September Feelings

So many things go through our head this month of September.  With the ever approaching darkness of winter, we are introduced to new sentiments of anxiety and fear that had been dispelled for a while by the summer sunshine.  The usual suspects—the conciliar Church and the deep state of our government—continue to collaborate in their efforts to blot out any rays of hope we may dare feel.  In Rome, Bergoglio flaunts two thousand years of Church teaching once again, this time in the heretical statement that all religions are gifts from God, leading souls to heaven by their diverse paths.  And Washington, with its impending election, forces us to ride a roller coaster of emotions, hoping one moment and tempted to despair the next.

In short, we are being herded into a grim pasture of seemingly unavoidable misery.  The forces of Satan are on the very brink of their greatest triumph since the Crucifixion, and all we, like sheep (as Isaiah prophesied) are being led astray, every one to his own way.  Each of us feels alone on this death march to who knows where.

We must remember that these emotions we experience, while based on the gloomy reality of perversion and iniquity that surrounds us, are still only emotions.  Our holy Mother the Church understands that this is the time of year when such feelings become more prevalent, and so she shows us how to channel these emotions into something useful, something meritorious that is good not only for our own souls but for the common wellbeing of our neighbors too.  She gives us the example of the Most Sorrowful Mother of God.  Her sorrow was also an emotional sorrow.  But it was a sorrow based not on vague fears of an unknown future, a dread of what she knows she must one day suffer.  It was the sorrow of compassion, a powerful pain deep in her heart of what her Son had to endure.  If we could but follow this example and train our hearts and minds to feel the wretched pain of others, we would be obeying our Lord’s greatest commandment to love him and then to truly love even the least of his brethren.

I receive a daily email from a family in the Canadian Maritimes.  It is a list of prayer requests from families all over the USA and Canada, families who are in distress and in desperate need of the prayers of their fellow Catholics.  Most of the requests are for family members who are in terrible pain, babies born with severe medical conditions, fathers who have had life-threatening accidents, parents diagnosed with terminal illnesses—the list is long and every day brings more suffering to our doorstep.  I would like to ask you today simply to keep all these intentions in your prayers, remembering that they are a mere drop in the ocean of suffering being experienced worldwide.  Try to feel real compassion for these poor children of God in their pain and sorrow.  The extra “sorrow” this new burden of compassion places upon us is a cross willed by God when he commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves.  May our September compassion take our minds off our own fears, worries and pains, and direct our “feelings” to the uplifting of others.  It is the compassion that made our Blessed Lady the Queen of Martyrs.  God will be pleased with this our own martyrdom, as we offer up our suffering for the benefit of those who suffer more.