The Anchoress got some disparaging email in response to”See How These Christians Shove One Another.  She was articulating “that we Christians are being ‘way too “earthbound” and over-worldly in the way we process and engage in politics.” The response of readers prompted her to print an email that she thought made her point, He says it so much better than I. In a nutshell, the writer said, in citing the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho, “The Israelites did not attack Jericho head-on in a conventional way but chose instead the mystical path and gave the Holy Spirit room to do His work.

I’ve been struggling along these same lines.  Blogging makes me painfully aware of it.  I start the day with Mass and the Divine Office and come home to enter the fray.  I bounce between the spiritual and not so spiritual with my own war of words.  I read Archbishop Charles J. Chaput’s “Render Unto Caesar” hoping to gain some footing.  He confirmed the battle for me but didn’t give me my marching orders.  I believe I need to use all the tools God has placed at hand.

The Rosary is called “a weapon” by those who know its power. Mass and the Divine Office are like heavenly dynamite empowered by the Holy Spirit.  Faith turns up that power and places it in the hands of the angels to do battle in the realm the Apostle Paul tells us about. “For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evils spirits in the heavens.” Ephesian 6: 12

I know, too,  I have other tools at my disposal: thoughts, words, deeds.  I know I mess up and will mess up, leading me back to prayer and repentance to begin again. Like Jesus on the Way of the Cross, I have to keep getting up and get myself up the mountain of Calvary for the Battle that wins the war. I don’t feel like a warrior, I think of myself as the little donkey carrying the Christ into Jerusalem for the climactic encounter between Good and Evil.  That’s were I am and I am tired.

When I complained of being tired though the battle has hardly begun, a friend wrote me saying,

“Remember the Narnia series?

Remember in “The Witch, The Lion and The Wardrobe”

how the children were confused, frightened, at the end

of their resources……..when they heard that Aslyn was

“on the move”.  Of course, they still had great battles

ahead but Aslyn had arrived…..  Have you had any such thoughts/feelings?  I hope that it is not wishful thinking on my part.”

What is left unsaid in the motto is also notable. The phrase is “Always faithful.” It isn’t “Sometimes Faithful.” Nor is it “Usually Faithful,” but always. It is not negotiable. It is not relative, but absolute.