It’s Hard to Keep Faith

This may sound a bit… woe is me. I don’t mean it that way. But I think it’s important to acknowledge how it’s hard to keep faith living in our country and our culture. So that we can be proactive and intentional.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while but was sparked to write about now. Today, we celebrate the Memorial of Saint Christopher Magallanes and Companions. From Magnificat:

In 1926, the newly implemented Mexican Constitution outlawed all public worship outside a church, closed Catholic schools, denied the Church’s right to hold property, and made it a crime to dress in clerical garb. With the cry of “Long live Christ the King and the Virgin of Guadalupe!” a three-year protest began against the revolutionary government. Mexican soldiers were charged with putting down the Catholic peasants, the Cristeros. Thousands were slaughtered. The twenty-five celebrated today were priests and laymen who preached and taught in rural areas. They never took up arms. One by one, they were abducted, tortured, and killed, the first in 1915 and the last in 1937.

Magnificat May 2024 Vol. 26, No. 3

Woah. That gave me chills this morning. And not because I didn’t already know the story. We have a favorite audio story about Saint Jose Sanchez del Rio who lived during this persecution. The movie, For Greater Glory, was made about his story. Even though I knew this, reading about their faith, amidst deep sacrifice, gave me pause.

We could have been born anywhere

You could have been born into slums in Africa. We could have been born in a country that tells us what religion we can practice, what job we can hold, and how many kids we can have. Instead, we were incredibly blessed to be born in a country where we have freedom to choose how to spend our time. Yet, I think about how if life was simpler… and more difficult… would our faith be greater? Perhaps because we needed it to be? If we had fewer distractions?

There are so many distractions

The First Commandment is “you shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20, CCC 496) Our society says all kinds of things are good and normal. Work, school, sports, extracurriculars, leisure time, outside time, self-care, sleep, knowledge, research, health. We are left with the task of discerning how to spend our time and we don’t have time for it all.

We can probably agree that if I only go to Mass for one hour on Sunday and the rest of the week do nothing for God or my faith, I’m missing the mark. I’m not living as the disciple God called me to be. I’m not spreading his gospel. I am probably falling very short in what Jesus said was the greatest commandment.

You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Matthew 22:36-40

It’s hard to keep faith

You have probably heard this story in a homily at some point and I apologize that I can’t find his name but the story goes like this… A man, living in a country where Catholicism is outlawed, endangers his life on a regular basis to get to Mass in secret. He lives to receive Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. After years of this, he and his family get the opportunity to move to America. Praise God!

They arrive and he finds work. He learns, that, unlike his old country, here in the United States if you work harder you make more money. So, he picks up extra jobs. Before long, he is working on Sundays and justifying missing Mass because he needs to work. I think in the story, it only took 6 months for him to go from risking his life to get to Mass each day to not even making it to Mass on Sundays, which is a mortal sin.

Is acknowledgement the first step?

I think the first step might be to acknowledge that it is difficult to live for God while living in a country with so many distractions. So, let’s recognize a few things and ask ourselves if we believe them.

• I want to know, love, and serve God in this world. I want to be happy with him forever, in Heaven.
• The devil is real. He is present in many places in our society and he loves that many people don’t acknowledge him or believe he is real.
• I can’t know, love, and serve God well if I don’t spend time with him. So I must get to Mass, spend time in prayer, and in adoration. If I’m going to discern God’s voice separate from the Devil’s voice, I need to spend time in conversation with him.
• I am my children’s first teacher and their primary teacher of the faith. It is my job as their parent to model the faith for them and to train them up in the way they should go. (Proverbs 22:6)
• If my family is not moving closer to God today, we are probably moving farther away.
• There are things in my life, that I am filling our time with, that are not glorifying God. Can I tweak them so they do? Can I get rid of them?
• How will I discern which things to spend our time on and which to say no to?

I do feel privileged and blessed to have grown up in a beautiful, stable neighborhood in America. But for the sake of my salvation, I need to acknowledge the ways in which it is hard to keep the faith amidst these distractions. So, I can be intentional.

Saint Christopher Magallanes and Companions, Saint Jose Sanchez del Rio, pray for us that we may love God above all else.