Overlooking the Opportunities to Grow in Holiness at Our Feet
Sponsored
Catholic365 is sponsored by
Road to Purity
The year 1095 resembled our own in many ways. The Church faced a great crisis. War raged all around her and within her own ranks.
For over a thousand years, Christians made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. They visited the birthplace of our Savior and walked the soil His feet trod. Then the Turks invaded and prohibited us from being there.
The Muslim faith promoted four possible fates for non-Muslims: Enslavement, being taxed into oblivion, forced conversion, or brutal deaths. Their faith permitted no compromise.
Byzantine Emperor Alexius I appealed to Pope Urban II for help. On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II spoke up for the Christians under siege at the Council of Clermont in France. He begged the noblemen and clerics gathered there to stop fighting one another and join their fellow Christians in the East. He wanted them to fight to reclaim the Holy Land.
His war cry roused the masses. Between 60,000-100,000 individuals joined these crusades. Some joined out of true piety and an ardent desire to defend the faith. Others joined because they saw an opportunity to increase their wealth via conquest.
Those who desired to defend the Holy Land and the Christians who lived in that area from attacks by their enemies operated with good intentions. Standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves is the intended use of strength.
However, they forgot something critical, something St. Paul cautioned us about in the New Testament:
“…we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” – Ephesians 6:12
They made the Muslims and the Jews their enemies rather than focusing the fight on the demons driving the division.
“Never let the enemy pick the battle site.” – General George S. Patton
A single man can win a battle against a hundred if he chooses the right battleground and the right tactics. He must lure the enemy to the place that offers him the greatest strategic advantage.
Then, he must find a way to create a bottleneck so that those one hundred men are forced to fight him one-on-one rather than being able to attack him all at once.
He must also look for ways to use the environment in his favor, so that it blocks the progress of the one hundred who stand against him. It is not an impossible battle to win, but it does require a sharp mind and quick wits. It requires knowing the enemy and yourself.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Pope Urban II made a tragic mistake in allowing the enemy to pick his battlefield for him. He tried to use the weapons of the enemy against him, but that will never work. Our enemy, Satan, knows war quite well. He's been waging wars against humanity from our first days on Earth.
He knows how to lie, steal, kill, and destroy. He’s good at that. He’s quite effective in those tactics – far more so than any human being ever could or would be. Allowing him to dictate where we fight and how is a mistake.
We lose every battle we fight when we allow him to pick our battlefield for us and try to go up against him with the weapons he created.
More than a thousand years ago, Christians lost confidence in love. We allowed ourselves to be deceived into believing that we needed to use the tactics of the enemy to win a war.
We doubted that what Christ gave us was enough to win the battle. We failed to place our trust in the work of the Holy Spirit. We didn’t understand ourselves well enough and we didn’t understand our enemy or we’d all be Catholic today.
Many Catholics feel besieged on every side by enemies both within the Church and outside of it, and we are. It’s not an illusion. It's a spiritual reality. The war between man and Satan always was and ever will be a war for the human heart!
If we understand the human heart, we will understand how it is that we possess the upper hand in this war and we will stop allowing our assets to be handed to us in these battles.
Satan cannot comprehend love. He never could. That’s what caused his fall.
When we operate in the realm of love, we become unstoppable. No enemy, either demonic or human, can stand against Love because God is Love!
The Holy Spirit guides us in how to leverage Love for our greatest advantage if we simply place our trust in Him. Nothing more is necessary.
“Much of the new technological, economic, political, administrative techniques of the Middle Ages were pioneered by the Catholic Church. The best equivalent for Silicon Valley in the 13th Century is the Vatican. This is where all the new ideas about administration, about information processing, this is where you went, to the Vatican…In the last 200 years, they became reactive forces. Most of what they do is react to the changes, to the inventions, the discoveries that other people make…A very good way of grasping the changing place of these religions in the world is to ask yourself two questions: First, what is the most important discovery of the 20th Century?...Now ask yourself a second question: What is the most important discovery made in the 20th Century by faced religions?“ – Dr. Yuval Harari, World Economic Forum, “New Religions of the 21st Century talk given to Google (30:00-34:19)
Critics of religion say religion is not relevant to society today. Some of them give passing credit to its social contributions in the past, but see it as irrelevant to the needs of modern man.
However, going back to Sun Tzu’s quote about knowing yourself being more than half the battle, I argue that the most important discovery made in the 20th Century centered on how critical love is to human life.
Abraham Maslow published his theory on human behavior, entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in 1943. It proposed man’s behavior to be driven by a “hierarchy of needs.” His theory was that the body’s needs were the most important needs and we couldn’t even begin to think about taking care of needs like those of love and belonging until we’d gotten the body's needs met.
That theory propelled the humanist movement and became the dominant thought in human behavior. Even to this day, it is taught in classrooms and teacher education programs around the world. But Maslow missed something.
Based on his theory, America should be the happiest nation on the planet. This nation offers its citizens unprecedented access to things the body needs, like food, water, shelter, and sex, yet our people are the most miserable on the planet.
Maslow’s mentor and colleague, Harry Harlow, saw the problem. He recognized it for what it was and set out to prove it. He took primates and tested them to see whether the primates would choose food over love. They chose love over food every time. In fact, isolated from love, they would choose to die rather than live even when all other needs were met. He published his findings in 1958 in a paper entitled, “The Nature of Love.”
Twenty years later, Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park findings supported Harlow’s work. He took rats from their natural social surroundings and gave them everything necessary to live except love. He gave them two water bottles – one laced with morphine and one that wasn’t. The isolated rats would drink from the morphine-laced bottle until they overdosed and died.
At first, he blamed the drugs for being too addictive. Then, he recognized something: he placed the rats in an unnatural environment for them.
After placing the rats back in their social environment, the addictions disappeared. They might try the drug, but they didn’t become addicts. Love was the cure and the armor needed to protect the rats from harm.
People die every day for a lack of love, and we possess the cure. We must rise up and let the Holy Spirit guide us in a new kind of crusade: A crusade to win the hearts of man for Christ.
The biggest obstacle between us and winning this war is our collective ignorance about the incredible gift we’ve received from the Catholic Church. We must not only become aware of the gifts the Church gives us but skilled the use of these gifts. We must learn the most effective tactics for employing these gifts.
The Rosary provides the complete set of strategies we need for every challenge we’ll meet on the battlefield. The enemy’s clever, but not creative. He uses the same tactics over and over again. Our Lady provided the instructions for winning those battles in the Rosary.
The Sacraments armor, equip and nourish us for the battle. They patch us up after we get wounded in battle and give us the means of generating reinforcement troops.
The Saints are those who fought and won victories ahead of us. They can give us support, guide us in tactics, and warn us about how to avoid pitfalls. All we must do is call upon them.
The Angels are God's special forces, connecting us to the Generals in the war. They carry messages from Headquarters and can lend us additional support in our battles. We need to listen to them and ask for their support.
Scripture reminds us of the reasons we fight this battle. It contains the complete story of God’s love for humanity and His ultimate plan for victory. We should study it as a soldier studies his field manual.
Human beings get distracted by all the noise of life even when we’re trying hard to focus. This distraction creates room for the enemy to slip in unnoticed and defeat us. He knows that if he can just get us to focus on the wrong things, he can attack us with impunity.
Love must become the first priority in your life. Everything else must be measured by that standard. If what you’re doing or planning to do doesn’t add love to the world, it doesn’t need to be done.
Why love? Because God is love and the first commandment of all is to love God above all things. That means loving Love above all things and making love the thing for which you are living, working, and striving at all times.
No amount of money will bring you what love will. You can’t reclaim one hour of your life once the time is spent, so make the best investment of your time that you can and focus on love.
If you love much, but your bank account is empty, your heart will be full. If you are monetarily rich, but your heart is empty, no amount of anything will be enough to satisfy you.
You’re human. You’re going to fail at this from time to time. But when you recognize you have, readjust your priorities and realign your actions accordingly.
When we don’t know love well enough, it’s easy to get confused when counterfeits show up. We can mistake flattery and pleasantries for love. We can mistake vanity and lust for love. Then, we get hurt when these prove false.
Scripture is the Book of Love. It’s God’s love letters to humanity. It’s an amazingly coherent story, despite the centuries and multiple authors that took their turn writing each book, if you know how to read it right.
In Act I, God creates man out of love to be loved and to love others. Man rejects that love, and God intervenes to save him from the death that He knows comes when we reject love. Time after time this cycle repeats. God rescues man, man rejects the demands of love, and God must come to save man from the death that such a rejection brings.
In Act II, God’s love leads Him to an act of extravagance no human mind could conceive: He unites his eternal, infinite, perfect being to a mortal, finite, flawed human being in a permanent and unbreakable union of love. Out of that union comes Jesus Christ, who is both 100% God’s perfect, undying, and infinite love and at the same time 100% human. This second act ends, not at the Crucifixion when Jesus allows humanity to put him to death for their own crimes, but at the resurrection when Christ triumphs over every obstacle between humanity and His perfect love.
In Act III, we walk with the apostles as the results of Christ’s triumph begin to transform the world around him. This act ends with the ultimate victory of love over all the things that stand against it – and an invitation to you and me: Will we side with love and join the winning team? Or will we choose selfishness and allow ourselves to perish?
Read Scripture long enough and you’ll recognize Love when it walks into a room. You’ll know what it smells like, sounds like, tastes like, feels like, and acts like. You’ll never again accept less. You’ll know you were made for more.
Before a single soldier takes his place on the battlefield, he practices and practices and practices. That practice ensures that he can do what’s necessary without thinking about it during the heat of a real conflict.
If we don’t practice loving others when it’s hardest to do, we’re not going to be good at doing it when it hurts most and we need the skills most. We’re going to fall away and become a liability in battle rather than an asset.
There’s no better place to practice the skills of loving the difficult person than in our families and our Churches. We’re going to meet all kinds of people there. We don't get to choose who attends or who is a member of our family, which is why it's the ideal training ground. We'll find in those spaces people who make themselves hard to love and people who make it easy and effortless.
We must push ourselves to keep striving to love those we find hardest to love. Those are the people who teach us the most about how well we are doing in learning to love as Christ loves. They act as mirrors to show us our weak spots and the areas we’ve not yet mastered.
This battle is not ours to win. It’s Christ’s. If we aren’t rooted in Him, connected to Him, getting nourished by Him, and letting Him take the lead, we’re going to fail. Hard.
In Mass, we receive Him both in His word and in His body and blood. In Adoration, we sit at His feet and learn from Him, allowing Him to teach and lead us.
To understand Adoration better, I offer you Father Mike Schmitz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6hXG43Fflw&pp=ygUXdW5kZXJzdGFuZGluZyBhZG9yYXRpb24%3D
In Mental Prayer, we allow the imagination to transport us into the Gospel so we can meet our Master where He lives and listen to what He says about where we are in life and what we must do.
If you want more information about mental prayer, here’s a talk that was given:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVOn4oYCtmY&pp=ygUNbWVudGFsIHByYXllcg%3D%3D
Making each day a battle for love will transform your life. That’s what Love does. It transforms us.
Don’t think you need to be perfect. As I explained in my last article, perfection is a journey and not a destination. Love will perfect you. All you need do is let it into your life.
You need not trust me on this matter. Believe in the promises of Christ. He told us, when giving us the Our Father, that when God’s will is done in our lives, His Kingdom will come. When love reigns supreme in our lives, hope will be with us and our joy will be full. We will know perfect peace no matter what the circumstance.
“The coming of the Kingdom cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is.’ For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” – Luke 17:20-21
It is my goal to produce more content to equip you for the battle. However, to devote myself to this work, I need your help.
Visit my Buy Me a Coffee Page and find out how we can work together to bring more love into this world.
Let's talk about it. What are your thoughts about crusading for love? Where are you finding the battle tough? What tactics are you using?
Award-winning international speaker and author, Brandy M. Miller is a Catholic revert. Raised in a culturally Catholic home, she left the faith at 16 in search of the truth and returned 12 years later when she found it right where she left it. Today, she is convinced that the Catholic Church is the cure to society's ills and is eager to help share the Gospel truth to those who have ears to hear it. When she isn't writing for or about the Catholic Church, she offers her writing talents to Catholics who would like help sharing their witnesses of Christ's work in their lives.
