Story by Joe Pisani
Every morning, I start my day by praying the daily offering and the Liturgy of the Hours, but then I make a major miscalculation. I leave behind the spiritual realm and jump right into the morning news … and my inner peace is disrupted.
It’s the same old stuff, which is getting worse by the day. The price of gas is going even higher, there are more shootings, more political demagoguery, more celebrity insanity, more threats of war, more attacks on the Church.
My first inclination is to stay in bed, pull the covers over my head and turn off my phone, but with a response like that we’ll never help Christ change the world.
What can a single Catholic do in the face of war, rioting, protests, crime, crisis and disaster? There’s only one true solution, and it’s not politics. It’s Christ.
In these troubled times, I’ve decided to get back to basics, and nothing is more basic than the Lord’s Prayer, which came right from the lips of Jesus. He gave us the answer 2,000 years ago. We have to pray to God that his will is done ON EARTH as it is in heaven.
Some of us have been saying the Our Father so long that we tend to forget it has implications for 21st century America and offers true hope in an age bereft of hope.
Think about those words. If God’s will were done on earth as it is in heaven, these problems wouldn’t exist. Lately I’ve been praying more fervently that God’s will be done. Despite the banal promises of political movements and causes, history is a testament to the fact that humanity will always be lost without God.
Equally disturbing, much of what our culture promotes and says is good is contrary to what our faith teaches. So many people have been deceived into believing bad things are good, which is something the prophet Isaiah decried 27 centuries ago when he wrote: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
Jesus often differentiated between the way of the world and the way of God. The way of the world occasionally may converge with the way of God, but ultimately it veers away, and when that happens, we have to be sure we stay on the right path rather than going astray by following popular causes and political agendas, neither of which is a substitute for the Gospel and the truths of our faith.
Yes, reading the daily news can be disheartening. It can drain you of hope and make you question your beliefs. Two things Catholics desperately need nowadays are hope and courage.
It also helps never to forget that as troubling as these times are, we’re assured victory as followers of Christ. No matter what happens, always remember that Christ is in control and Christ has always been in control.
So pray the Our Father from your heart. Pray it often. We have to abandon ourselves to God’s will so that it can be done on earth as it is in heaven. In the classic devotional book Living the Lord’s Prayer, Dom Eugene Vandeur, O.S.B. said that after receiving Communion, we should adopt the practice of making a living prayer of abandonment to God’s will. He shared this story from a friend:
“The other day, I was saying to myself that the will of my Father would be badly received today in the world; that many souls would reject it, would want no part of it, would revolt; and that among those who would accept it, very few would do so with the love it deserves.
“Then I asked Jesus to give me his Father’s will in its entirety, before pouring it out into the world, so that in my poor heart at least it might find an act of absolute adoration and love, which so many souls refuse to give it….Since then I have been thinking of myself as a tiny repository into which the will of God descends every minute before giving itself to men.”
If we abandon ourselves to God’s will at Communion, the world will be one step closer to accepting God’s will.