Leave No One Behind! Kill the Wounded!

Allow me a very self-indulgent post today. Yes, I know, they’re all self-indulgent. That’s why you write a blog in the first place, Silly!

When I was young…Oh, a few of you are still here…anyway, when I was young, I had a football coach who took the following view of injuries:

If it’s more than a foot away from your heart, you’re okay. Get back in there!

He was a big, gruff, ex-professional football player whose career spanned the years when face-masks were still a novelty, and long before the current obsessive concern with player safety (there’s a post for another day). Of course, he was exaggerating a bit, nevertheless, he was unsympathetic to players who faced injuries less than heroically.

Life delivers an unending series of bumps and bruises. Learning to deal with them is imperative if you want to survive, let alone thrive. However, some wounds are easier to deal with than others. Spiritual wounds are the most painful, the most lethal, and the hardest to deal with, especially when it is your brother or sister in Christ who is the wounded one.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that “the Church is the only army that kills its wounded.” Jesus prayed the night before He went to the cross that we Christians would be one, but here we are some 2000 years and change later more divided than ever before. For those of us who are Roman Catholic, we understand this very well. The world hates us because we are Christian. That’s fine, even something to be proud of, but we also face rejection from the rest of the Church. The Eastern Church rejects us because we are Catholic, the Protestant Church rejects us because we are Catholic, and Catholics reject us because we are too Catholic or not Catholic enough. Good grief! This is not something for which Christians should be proud. The wounds in the Body of Christ will never be healed as long as we continue to see each other through eyes of pride and suspicion, and not through the eyes of love.

Looking at the problem at a more microscopic level, what do we do when we encounter a brother or sister in Christ who is in pain? Perhaps they are crushed under the burden of some sin, a loss of faith, dryness in their relationship with God, or the blackness of despair. How do we treat them? Do we handle them with gentleness and mercy, or judgment and contempt?

“Pick yourself up,” we say. “Have more faith!” we declare. “It’s not about you,” we scold. All of these things may be true, but are unhelpful. A person contemplating suicide—and that’s exactly what spiritual wounds can lead to, eternal suicide—is not in the frame of mind to hear arguments about the sanctity of life, about the pain they are causing others, or the strict judgment of God on the person who commits suicide. Their mind is darkened by the lies of the evil one that say, “You are worthless!” “God hates you and has given up on you!” “You will never, ever, get your act together!” What that person needs to hear is just the opposite. Only the mercy of Christ will break through that impenetrable cloud of darkness and turn the person’s life back around.

Are we bearers of that message to our own? We proclaim it to the world, but do we speak it to each other?

In her diary, Divine Mercy in My Soul, St. Maria Faustina Kowalska wrote about her conversations with Jesus. In one such exchange, He said to her:

My daughter, know that My Heart is mercy itself. From this sea of mercy, graces flow out upon the whole world. No soul that has approached Me has ever gone away unconsoled. All misery gets buried in the depths of My mercy, and every saving and sanctifying grace flows from this fountain. My daughter, I desire that your heart be an abiding place of My mercy. I desire that this mercy flow out upon the whole world through your heart. Let no one who approaches you go away without that trust in My mercy which I so ardently desire for souls.¹

That broken soul, who opened her wounded heart to you just now, belongs to Christ. Do not send her away empty.

St. Faustina, pray for us!

 

¹Divine Mercy in My Soul, Kowalska, Maria Faustina, (Marian Press, Stockbridge, MA, 2005) pg 629