There’s a Lot to Worry About: Here’s the Answer
January 23, 2022
Jesus Christ: Yesterday, Today, and Forever ~
I love that little introductory line just above this one, it comes from Hebrews 13:8 where St. Paul is relating that through all the trials and changes of life one thing remains constant – Jesus Christ and the eternal Truth. What it says to me is this: I am God, fear no man, be faithful to Me, I am God.
Our world seems awash in bad news, more so than say five years ago e.g., covid, crime, government spending, inflation, supply chain problems, congressional deadlock, civil discord, loss of faith in democracy, Russia, China, and the list goes on and on. What makes our round of problems even more anxiety inducing is a pervading sense that things aren’t going to get better, but worse. As if things are on the brink of some kind of societal breakdown. So people are living now with a heightened sense of anxiety and dread compared to only a few years ago. What can be done about it?
Most people assume we should stay constantly informed by the media, a voracious dragon, and fight for what we think is right. How’s that been working? Since no one has absolute power to make everyone else do what they want, not the President, and certainly not me/you/us, then nothing changes for the better, and a lot of people lose their peace. So what can be done about all these problems?
At some point we have to realize that the greatest way we can effect positive change, is for us as individuals to positively change. Our focus needs to shift from changing others to changing ourselves. There is great peace in simply letting go of the things we can’t control, and we don’t control hardly anything.
So here’s the answer to fixing the worlds’ problems – be a saint. Being a saint is literally the greatest thing we can do with our lives, and by God’s grace, does more to change the world for the better than any power struggle could hope to achieve. It does wonders for ones’ peace of mind too.
I have attached some of an article below by Roberto de Mattei on this subject. I hope you enjoy it.
In Jesus, I Love You,
Fr. Thomas Nathe
Holiness: The Only Solution to the Crisis of Our Time (Roberto de Mattei)
. . . Man risks psychological breakdown when he becomes unaware of the one true end of his life, which is our sanctification and the glory of God.
One could object that many individuals, in spite of having lost sight of man’s primary end, seem psychologically untroubled and at ease. And yet the psychological stability that health, money, and the affections themselves give is only apparent. Individuals who are apparently strong, but devoid of God, are like the houses built on sand of which the Gospel speaks. All it takes is the loss of one of the false goods on which they rely to unleash a psychological crisis in them. But what happens when the risk to their lives does not come from the loss of individual goods but from social disasters like a war or a pandemic that disrupts society? Then more than ever the words of the Gospel come true: “The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it” (Mt 7:27).
In the stormy epochs of history we must understand that it is only within ourselves that we can find the solution to the problems that afflict us. We are not fighting a political, social, or medical battle, but we are soldiers of a long war against the flesh, the devil, and the world that goes back to the origins of creation. In this battle, as Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1974) explains: “an interior life is for each of us the only thing necessary” (The three ages of the spiritual life, It. tr. Fede e Cultura, Verona 2020, p. 21). The true life of man is not in fact the superficial and external life of the body, destined for decay and death, but the immortal life of the soul, which orders its powers in the right direction.
God does not ask us to save society, but asks us to save our souls and to give him glory, socially as well, through public witness to the truth of the Gospel. It is God alone who saves society, and He does so through the Church, which never loses its distinctive features, starting with the holiness that is intrinsic to it. For this reason, in times of general confusion and malaise, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange again writes, “there is the need for each of us to think about the only thing necessary and to ask the Lord for saints who live by this thought alone and can be the great exemplars that the world needs. In the most turbulent times, such as in the era of the Albigensians and later with the rise of Protestantism, the Lord sent multitudes of saints. The need is making itself felt no less today” (The three ages of the spiritual life, op. cit., pp. 23-24).
Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875) does not put it any differently: “In his infinite justice and mercy, God bestows saints upon the various epochs, or decides not to grant them, in such a way that, if one may use the expression, the thermometer of holiness is needed to determine the condition of normality of an era or a society” (Le sens de l'histoire, in Essai sur le naturalisme contemporain, Editions Delacroix, 2004, p. 377).
This means that there are stingier centuries and others more generous, in terms of correspondence to the graces that God bestows in the call to holiness. One century poor in saints was the fifteenth, and one generous century was the sixteenth; one stingy century was the twentieth, with a few dazzling exceptions; will the twenty-first be a century of generous correspondence to grace? What is the temperature that the spiritual thermometer of our time indicates?
If we look around us we do not see the great saints we would like to have rising up beside us to sustain us. Perhaps, however, we forget that the criterion of holiness is not sensational miracles, but the capacity of souls to live in abandonment to Divine Providence day by day, as did Saint Joseph; model of holiness, silent and faithful warrior, active and contemplative soul, perfect example of the balance of all the natural and supernatural virtues.
And today, more than ever, we need saints, just and balanced men, who live according to their reason and their faith, never becoming discouraged, but only trusting in the help of Divine Providence and of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
