We Sure Could Use Your Help Now
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
1 Corinthians 13:13
Every night, when I turn on the TV and listen to the news or pick up a copy of the NY Post or Wall Street Journal, I am greeted with incessant finger-pointing and doom and gloom predictions. TV pundits talk incessantly about the failings of our President, how he appears to be a bit feeble and forgetful and has great difficulty speaking. We are presented with horrific acts…a woman being set on fire by an illegal immigrant on a subway; a young man being pushed onto the subway tracks by a crazed man; a man crashing his truck into citizens on a New Orleans street, killing 15 and injuring 35, then opening fire on police who returned fire and killed him. Horrible, incomprehensible acts.
What I rarely hear or read is…what can we do about it? I can think of two things.
The first is we can pray.
I know, in today’s materialistic world, it is not fashionable to bend a knee and pray to the Almighty, but if you know your history, then surely you must know that the Father of our Country, George Washington felt strongly that we owe Divine Providence a great debt for His help in the successes of the American Revolution and our Freedoms guaranteed under our Constitution. Abraham Lincoln felt the same way.
And the second…well we all need to strive to live our lives like this next person.
Enter Anjeze Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Now this woman’s given name probably does not ring a bell, but it is a reasonably safe bet that you know her as Mother Theresa, now a Saint of the Roman Catholic Church. I had the privilege of meeting her briefly in Rome about 50 years ago. I was standing beside Michaelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peters Cathedral and this diminutive nun came by to also pray. I was admiring the brilliance of Michaelangelo’s masterpiece, and I greeted her respectfully. She smiled warmly, asking inquisitively… American? I replied yes, then told her I admired her work with the poor and wished her well. She thanked me, said she would pray for me and then began praying her rosary. I had no idea then that I was in the presence of someone who would one day become a Saint. But I remember her to this day, her beautiful smile, and caring eyes. She was special.
At Mass this past Sunday, the Feast Day of the Incarnate Mother, I thought of Mother Theresa again and prayed fervently to her. I asked that she intercede to help our leaders in Washington come to their senses and return to God, think about the people they represent and are sworn to serve, put aside their hatred for President Trump, and not seek power for the sake of power but to use it to benefit all of us, not tear us apart.
Mother Theresa was the epitome of kindness and love in her lifelong mission of ministering to the poor, sick, homeless, and hungry in Calcutta. She lived among the poor, ministering to the lowest of the low and inspiring millions of people of all faiths and walks of life, from those who tilled the fields to heads of state and international corporations. She hardly ever spoke much, but when she did, people listened. They trusted her. She exuded love and faith to go along with hope and charity. Her funding came from donations and contributions; every penny went into food and clothing for those who needed it most. She never asked why people contributed to her charity because she was not in the business of passing judgment. She was in the business of passing out food and offering shelter for those in need.
In accepting her Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Theresa said:
“…and so, let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love, and once we begin to love each other, naturally we want to do something good.”
So much wisdom from such a small and fragile nun!
In the 50 years since I met her in Rome, I have never heard a single human being speak a bad word about Mother Theresa. Not one word. She was universally loved and admired. How many of us can say that about another human being? Yet, I did hear that once someone questioned why she did not extend her mission towards educating those she cared for. Why not educate instead of just handing out food and offering shelter? Her answer was soft, simple, caring, and profound. She said, “if you do not feed them today, they will starve.” She believed passionately that this was her mission; educating and training them was someone else’s mission. As usual, this small, frail woman with a giant heart was right.
When Mother Theresa passed away on September 5, 1997, the whole world should have stopped for a moment of silence to honor her. That didn’t happen largely because, if you think back to that point in time, the world was still in mourning from the untimely and tragic passing of Princess Diana in late August and that consumed the media and the world. Certainly, in Calcutta, Mother Theresa was mourned. And she is most assuredly missed today. In my moment of silent prayer at Mass on Sunday, I thought what would Mother Theresa say about what is transpiring today in the world? What does she think about the many challenges we face here and abroad? I believe she would answer with a phrase she has uttered countless numbers of times: “We cannot do great things; we can only do many small things with great love.”
So, in reflecting about the life of this instrument of God’s mercy and love, I pray fervently that in the days and months ahead, we somehow find ourselves, reinforce our commitment to education, reject fear, put God back in our classrooms, Halls of Justice, in our military and in our daily lives, embrace truth and reject the lies we are continually told, denounce evil wherever and whenever it is found, reinvigorate pride in America and respect for our Flag and the Republic it represents, live and enjoy our lives fully and become, once again, One Nation Under God, with Liberty and Justice for all.
Isn’t that worth praying and striving for? Aren’t these values worth fighting for?
The second thing we can do, and this is primarily addressed to our younger generation, is to resolve to put on the uniform of our country. We desperately need to reinvigorate in our youth a sense of patriotism, of service above self, a desire to serve something greater than oneself. Because from their ranks will come the great captains who will lead our nation the moment the war tocsin sounds. And Lord knows, given the Biden purge of our military and his insistence that critical race theory be front and center and firmly entrenched in our service academies, we must find and cultivate such people.
I just started to re-read Tom Brokow’s excellent book The Greatest Generation, and there is a profound paragraph in the Preface to this book and it reads:
“As I walked the beaches of Normandy with the American veterans who had landed there and now returned for this 40th Anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories in the cafes and inns, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me when I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished. These men and women had come of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over the land like a plague. They had watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their savings, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day at a time. Then just as there was a glimmer of hope for an economic recovery, war exploded across Europe and Asia. When Pearl Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, this generation of Americans was summoned to the parade grounds and told to train for war. But many actually were not summoned they volunteered. At one point America had 16.3 million in uniform. They left their ranches in Texas, the assembly lines in Detroit and the ranks of Wall Street. They quit school or college and many went from cap and gown directly into uniform. They answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.”
“They faced great odds but did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love and the lessons of the workaday world, they found themselves fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and in the far off jungles of the Pacific on islands few have ever heard of before…places like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.”
“When the war was over, they briefly celebrated, then returned to America resuming the process of building the lives and the world they wanted. They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy the world has ever seen. They made breakthroughs in medicine and science; gave the world new art and literature; civil rights legislation and Medicare. And while they were doing all this, they rebuilt the economies and political institutions of their enemies. They literally rebuilt 19 nations in Europe and the entire nation of Japan. They were by no means perfect; they made mistakes as all of us do. But it is instructive to reflect on the lives of this generation because their lives were laced with the markings of greatness. At every stage of their lives they were part of historic challenges and achievements of a magnitude the world had never before witnessed.”
“Above all else, these men and women believed in America and its freedoms and they believed in the principles upon which our country was founded. And they knew in their hearts, minds, and souls that it was worth fighting and dying for. And they did”
We need to find such men and women. But trust me, they are all here in this place we call America. All we need do is look for them and then cherish them. They are our future.
