Here I Am. Send Me.

 

A lot of hand-wringing and angst-tweeting by faithful Catholics with the in-your-face juggernaut of corporate Pride, Inc. as the month of June is peeking its colorful head around the corner. It can often feel like a David and Goliath situation and I don't blame our brethren for staying in their safe spaces and raising cain from a keyboard. Real life is sloppy and often unscripted. A lot of times, even though people won't always admit it to themselves, people are just trying to figure things out as they go.

I spent the afternoon having lunch with a now-friend who is a member of our parish community. I listened intently to him for an hour and a half relay the tales of the pre-indult period spent fighting to sustain the Latin Mass in our diocese, from the early 1960's til not too long ago. He (and his elderly father) were in the trenches: invested in time, money, energy, and spiritual capital to keep the flame of tradition alive when everything around them was working to make sure it was snuffed out for good; the "Latin Mass celebrated in a hotel" were not just fairy tales from a time long long ago. They also endured hostility from all sides, and were not immune to in-fighting as well.  At times it was barely a flicker of light in a vast darkness, and I don't think many people newer to tradition realize what was endured during those early days. 

There were no blue-prints or script for how to go about fighting these battles; but they knew what was at stake and that it was worth fighting for. I admire that, as I admire my now-friend, even if there is a lot I am still working through myself and how little I still know about the history of the Council and the tumultuous wake it left faithful Catholics in. In speaking (or rather listening) to him, it became clear that there is no 'perfect way' of going about these things, and the only ones who get it right are the Monday-morning quarterbacks and critics highlighting the shortcomings after the fact. 

I'm a little bit of a thinker, but it's more outweighed by the impetus to 'do.' I loathe meetings and conferences and talking ad nauseum when it isn't followed by action. When I reflect back on my time spent in the Lion's Den of San Francisco Pride six years ago when I took a red-eye out from the East Coast to SFO to witness to the 1M+ attendees there to the truth of the Gospel, there were many times I thought to myself "What the hell am I doing? I just dropped $700 on a flight to stand in the middle of a mob of gay activists and BDSM hedonists for four hours and hand out rosaries and witness to a people who want to hear nothing of what I have to say, then fly back the same day. And I have an abject fear of crowds to boot! Why, why am I doing this? I don't want to do this!" The answer was pretty straight-forward: The Lord through the Holy Spirit sighed "Who shall I send? Who will go for us?" and before I could think twice or second-guess it, I replied: Here I am. Send me! (Is 6:8)

I didn't know what to expect, or what I was expecting. It seemed like a fool's errand. But as I have lived as a Catholic for the past twenty five years, my inner convictions in one area have stayed firm: if I can bring even one person to Christ and the Gospel and the truth of the Catholic faith, I can die having lived a good and purposeful life. In that massive sea of rainbow fish, there may have been one soul swimming upstream in his mind but not knowing where he was going. It was raining men all day, but I was fishing--not with a massive net on a commercial ship, but with a single rosary line on a clapboard tugboat. Souls are often won one at a time, and even that one soul you may have to fight and plead tooth and nail for. 

So, I went. I remember feeling like a fool, but also at peace for having the assurance of the Holy Spirit that at least in that moment, I was doing what God was calling me to do. Not bitching, not complaining, but taking action. It was a good lesson for me, and one I kept close to my heart years later. 

The funny thing is there was a moment when I felt the Holy Spirit clearly saying GO and I hesitated for an hour or so. We were on vacation at the time, and I remember when I was checking available flights online (an hour later, as I was hemming and hawing and thinking this was crazy), the one I was going to book suddenly jumped up $200 more than the one from an hour before. It was the only flight out of PHL that came back the same day, but it was going to cost me a good bit more. So I booked it. It was a good lesson--when the Lord calls, don't hesitate to answer. 

 I should mention too I work in an extremely LGBTQ friendly-Marxist environment, so it felt especially tenuous and I was fearful of any professional repercussions were I to get caught up in any media presence, etc. A lot of those fears were unfounded. A valuable lesson I learned from a civil-rights activist (which I quoted from in my article Christian Men, Take the Beating) and took to heart was this:

"They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.  

And you know what? The worst of the worst wasn’t that bad. Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?

These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail. That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep-throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another." 

If you know what's right, you don't count the cost. You fight for it. You go where you are called. You obey the Lord. You take the beating. 

I found in a deep-recess of my email my reflections from that day in the belly of the beast. It's interesting to read it now, because I, too, get comfortable in my little Catholic bubble, my safe space. I don't want to look like a fool. I have a lot to lose. But there is a danger, too, in not obeying the Lord, passing by opportunities to witness, ignoring grace or signal graces or gut-feelings, not only speaking when you should hold your tongue but holding your tongue when you should speak, or only speaking when you should be marching, or only marching when you should be locking and loading. 

We are called to labor and work, and we don't need to always do it perfectly, with imaginary Catholic critics in the back of our heads pointing out all the things we are doing wrong. Half the battle is showing up, and when you live by faith you are given your marching orders but not a crystal ball. The Lord gives us what we need to know in that moment, and not before. 

I may be accused of getting things wrong more often than not--but it's harder to accuse those who seek to be faithful and follow and back it up with the imperfect labor of the the second son, the one who says, "I won't go," and then puts his gloves on.  

So, do the work. Don't worry. After all, you are called to be faithful, not successful. 

Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2017 at 08:21:35 PM EDT

Subject:

It has been a marathon day, and I'm pretty spent, but God is so good. A few reflections from SF Pride while it's fresh in my mind:

The first is that everyone was pretty pleasant and free-spirited for the most part. There was not a lot of belligerence, no yelling and minimal confrontation. These are not "bad people," but as i see it, they are lost, hurting people, and also other people just going along with the crowd. There was a lot of drugs in the air, you could smell it everywhere, so maybe people were just happy I don't know. Joseph is very mild mannered and polite and admits that his presence there is a bit of a Johnny Appleseed operation. People didn't know what to make of us. I think they were so pleasant because there were many gay-affirming churches present at booths and I guess they thought we were just members of another one of them, since we were wearing shirts that said, "Jesus loves gay men and women." Which is true, but hard to go into it on the street...that Jesus everyone without exception, loves us so much he wants more for us than what we degrade ourselves to. It was boots-on-the-ground ministry and hard to connect one-on-one, so we gave out rosary bracelets and a card with Joseph's website, I think in the hopes that they will visit the site after the parade at home when things aren't so crazy. Joseph said his site gets about twenty times more traffic in the days after Pride. I remember the first post I read when I found his website was 'Hell is For Real' about his near-death experience. I think that's what struck me about the day, what I made mention to Susan: this parade, this world...it's not reality. It's somebody's reality, but it's not what is really true and really real. It is as if there is a cliff behind the curtain, and nobody really sees it. For four hours I wore a smile (a genuine one, mind you) and said more "God bless you's" than I could count. But on the inside I was breaking up at the offenses against our Lord, the perversion. I offered up the soreness, the sunburn, the hunger and thirst to The Lord in the hopes he would pardon such offenses, an act of reparation that pales with what he endured on the cross for us.

Something interesting note as well was that this really was a quasi-religious event, albeit not in the traditional sense. There was a procession of sorts, down Market Street. There were men in underwear dancing on platforms wearing angel wings. One man was dressed as the pope in mockery, blessing people...another, Our Lady, a kind of blasphemous Madonna. Why would they do this? Like Satanists who do not have Black Masses at a Methodist church, or an Episcopal church, or a Baptist church...they mock the Catholic Church, and desecrate the Eucharist. And it was very similar here. Satan mocks, and he doesn't bother to mock what has no power. But there was also a hunger here, a hunger for God and what is religious and even Catholic...but not on God's terms. It was a perverted substitution. There was also a legitimate sense of a craving for love and affirmation, but somewhere along the line a hurt, a trauma maybe came in and something must have failed along the way. Joseph has written about this. You wouldn't believe how many rosary bracelets we gave away, people wanted them, but in a way in which they did not understand.  There was dancing and laughter and happiness, but it felt like a facade because like Joseph, I know what's on the other side. It is easy, so easy to go along with what is around you, when you are surrounded by it as the majority, and it's even seen as good. But it was like...I felt like I was in an alternative universe where everything was upside down. It didn't shake my faith, but it made me fearful of God's judgment. God has been so patient with us, and I think that time may be running out, and so I pray the rosary every day and if anything flying out here has convinced me to start fasting and offering up sacrifices for conversions. Because there is really nothing we can do on our own, the force against us is to strong. We need God. NEED Him. And prayer is an indispensable weapon in this fight.

One thing that bothered me was seeing children at an event like this. I thought of my own children, and so many other children...toddlers, pre-teens, and adolescents...who are just being born into this confusion and won't know any different.

Joseph made an interesting point too, that there were many corporate sponsors of the event, a lot of backing. It felt like Goliath, honestly...a powerful force to be reckoned with. I felt like a needle in a haystack. I had peace and an assurance of being on the 'wrong side of history,' because it was evident that this was the history of man, not God, for God is not the author of confusion (1 Cor 14:33). It made my heart heavy, but only because as a Christian I was finally entering into the fray; it was new to me, but not new to human history, for the world will hate us because it hated Him first (Jn 15:18), and we'd better get used to it if we want to be Christ's disciple.

My final reflection is that the scene was just saturated with sex. It's like you get numb to it. And that's not how God intended sex to be. There was no modesty at all, and I'm not talking in a prissy kind of way. I wasn't scandalized by it per se, but it's just...if people knew the power and holiness of sex as God intended it. I don't know. It's like a secret, but one that God wants us to know. There was a part of the parade where people would engage in all kinds of perversions, and Joseph said in the past he has gone over and prayed over that area, you know outstretching his hand and all. And people would react violently, the way demonics would react to being exorcised kind of.

I can't help but think the Church has let people down. I'm not talking about the Catechism or the Holy Spirit's assurance that the gates of Hell will not prevail against Her. I'm talking about waffling and wavering in practice. The temptation to be liked is so strong, and I'm sure those in ministry and pastoring have made the mistake of capitulating so as not to be hated. Well guess what? If you're not hated for your faith, it should give you pause. Because we are past time for dialogue and understanding. You'd better pick up sides and get on your knees when you see what we are up against, the way Satan has his way in the world. Now, I'm late to this fight, so maybe I'm just as much to blame. But the narrow path is becoming more clear to me as the only way to be saved. It should have been clear from the start.

I'm tired and sunburned, hungry and thirsty, and I thank God and give him praise for the opportunity to offer it up these pittances and to taste some of the derision and sorrow He experienced as he hung for us, men of the mob who favored Barrabas over the very Son of God. I don't know why he called me fly out here from Philadelphia. I hope maybe we touched one person. God bless Joseph for his endurance and compassion and commitment to Truth in a way that is not always understood or accepted as normative, and to people who most of us would not minister to. What a blessing to go into the trenches with him, even if just for a day. And thank you thank you thank for all your prayers, they sustained us for sure.