A Paradox of Discipleship
Dear Parishioners of Our Lady of Divine Providence Family of Parishes,
Our scripture readings this week highlight one of the strangest paradoxes of discipleship: the role of courage in proclaiming the faith and doing God’s will. Oftentimes, doing the right thing earns us misunderstanding and reproach from others, and personal difficulty ourselves. But if we truly thirst for God, as the psalm says, and offer ourselves as living sacrifices, and if we let our minds be transformed, as the second reading puts it, then, we can live out the courageous life to which we are called. Let us learn from St. Peter to think as God does, rather than as men do.
Please take a moment to read and ponder this passage about courage from GK Chesterton, from his book Orthodoxy. He offers it as a commentary on the wisdom in today’s Gospel:
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying… He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more…
Our world today is full of troubles and anxieties… but if we are willing to take up our cross, lay down our lives for others, and follow God’s call regardless of where it leads or what other people might think… then in this life we can find true meaning, and unbounded joy in the life to come.
Yours in Christ, with Mary,
Fr. Henry Hoffmann
