Making small changes in a still wounded world

A Reflection for Saturday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

If you’ve become aghast and forlorn because of the dizzying contradictions and unreasonableness that typifies the world swirling around us just now, you may find something reassuring in today’s first reading from 2 Timothy.

Indeed, these days, as in Paul’s time, it surely feels like an era has opened up “when people will not tolerate sound doctrine” and “following their own desires and insatiable curiosity” have ceased “listening to the truth” and become “diverted to myths.”

My young colleagues surely fear that they are living in the worst of times, but it’s a kind of arrogance to believe that one occupies a uniquely troubled or irrational era. Surprise! It seems it’s just a part of the human condition. A heck of a lot happened just in this beloved country’s near past and plenty of it was bad, like earth-ending bad.

In my infancy, a beloved president was murdered. As a child, Vietnam troubled headlines, neighbors posted draft lotteries on refrigerators and U.S. cities burned. As a teen, my family endured the near bankruptcy of the city of New York. The Bronx was burning while my father served heroically in the F.D.N.Y., and the Ramones were rocking the blighted, crumbling Lower East Side. 

Somehow we survived the nuclear arms race, Watergate, civil wars in Central America, U.S. deindustrialization and the fall of the Soviet Union and apartheid.

I guess these are not exactly words of encouragement as much as an attempt to console anxious minds. As insane as you may be tempted to believe our current times are, welp, there have been plenty of decades that were a lot worse, and somehow this country has trudged along, edging closer each day now to its 250th anniversary. That remains a reason for celebration.

But what to do if you find yourself unexpectedly inhabiting troubled times? Paul wrote to his “true son in the faith” while imprisoned by Nero, as insane and destructive a leader as any nation has ever witnessed, and Paul’s missive was intended to shore up a battle-fatigued minister holding up a mocked and distrusted faith in a hostile city.

Paul did the only thing that he could do under the personal and epochal circumstances he confronted. He persevered; he proclaimed the word, “persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient.”

In an interview with Daniel Berrigan, S.J., about a thousand years ago, as a young “social justice” journalist frustrated by the lack of progress (whatever that means) I perceived in the world around me, I told Berrigan I had grown weary hearing Catholic activists tell me they were “called to be faithful, not successful.”

“Wouldn’t it be great to be successful once in a while?” I asked him.

The corners of Berrigan’s mouth lifted into the faintest smile. “Are you successful?” he asked me.

It’s a question that still comes by to haunt me every so often, especially when I wonder after nearly 40 years of ranting and reporting on America’s social ills if all that blathering and finger-pointing and raging had accomplished anything.

I guess like Paul we cannot know the future we contribute to, writing brief epistles from dank and dreary cells of space and time. We can only know that we must stay the course, run our race, fight the good fight and keep the faith, and at the end, which awaits us all, offer a short prayer: Please allow me to recall how I have “succeeded” in such without an iota of smuggery or self-righteousness, but in mercy and compassion for myself and the no doubt still wounded world I depart.

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