Translating a World on the Edge

Years and years ago, when I graduated from Spring Hill College with a Fine Arts degree, I was a painter who absolutely loved to create something new on canvas.  The process was an odd one, because before a painting was finished it always seemed the canvas on which I was working went through a phrase of total messiness, confusion about my subject matter, and a period of time when I wanted simply to cover it over or pitch it out because it looked so awful. And there were occasions when I did exactly that.  But usually, if I kept at it, the clean-up of the canvas finally produced a good painting. This is true of a lot of life’s problems, too. Something good emerges out of an apparent mess. Peace often emerges after turbulence, and satisfaction after heartache.

Look at your own life. Has solving your own problems ever been easy? Haven’t your problems sometimes seemed overwhelming? Did you think about giving up, or running away to get rid of them?

I believe this is what is happening in our beloved Catholic Church.  We are most definitely in the messy phase.  My heart breaks when I see what is happening in some of its hierarchy that is, presently, so diseased it has ignored Truth!

Yet, I look at my own parish priest, and all the parish priests and teaching priests who are loyal to the real Truth, God’s Truth, and my heart is full of love and deep respect for them.  Their faith is strong and firm. They are confident that our God will clean this up for He will not let the evil–which is present today– stay in His church.

But God’s clean-ups can be messy, and today, we are experiencing that very awful mess. Still, we will not throw away the canvas God has created for us.—because He will fix it. He will heal our Church. And we will work with Him. We will pray, we will fight against evil, until it has been conquered. Trust in God. It will happen.