Some Thoughts on the
Liturgy
WINNING
THE SPIRITUAL WAR
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In one of the religious magazines that we get, there was a
stinging article about what the author called a “spiritual
war” in our country
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he was speaking about organized Christian religion in this
country and the job we who are leaders in that religion should
be doing
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he said that we are in the midst of a spiritual war, and at
stake is the whole of Western civilization
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he felt that there is an effort being made to rid our country
of Christian influence
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saying that 300 years from now, people will refer to this
spiritual war as the most important struggle that organized
Christian religion had to face since the days of Constantine
when Constantine made the state Christian around 312 AD
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the author felt that we are losing the war and that people
will judge that we lost the war because Churches have placed
far too much time and importance on buildings and policies and
far too little time on what really matters
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namely problems like the breakdown of families, increases in
divorce, pornography, illicit sexual pleasure and spiritual
laziness (AFA,
June 1998)
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The thought may be a little strong, but I think he makes sense
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and gives us a pretty good basis to do some thinking about our
own involvement in this spiritual war that he claims is going
on
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making us ask the question: if it is true that we are losing
this spiritual war, why are we losing it?
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the author of that article suggested that the answer is really
quite simple---
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… ourselves—we are the problem
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he claims that we simply are not doing enough
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Whether that is true or not is up to us to answer in the
silence of our hearts, but Jesus in the Gospel gives us a way
to do better perhaps than we are right now
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in that Gospel, Luke gives us how Jesus taught about
connection with God, that is, prayer
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prayer, connection with God, with the implicit understanding
that if we give enough time to the pursuit of prayer,
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we will gradually change our thinking into the thinking of
Jesus
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But prayer itself has become a problem, I believe, because
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too often, prayer has become a “thing” for many of us
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we “do” it, we “say” it, we make sure we have the
correct words
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for many, prayer has become nothing more than an “external”,
almost like a weapon that we use to try to manipulate God, to
get the things that we think we need, to do the things that I
want
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but the spiritual war is not going to be won by prayer which
is self-serving
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The spiritual war will be won by prayer that changes hearts
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and makes us see the importance of the values that Jesus
teaches
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the values that are contained in the Our Father which he
teaches us in the Gospel—values that deal with praise,
forgiveness of others, and the need to repent
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in fact, the prayer discourse of Jesus in the Gospel leads us
to understand three things in particular about prayer that
should change our hearts
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1,
we have to keep at it—persistence
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we saw it in the first reading, we heard Jesus talk about it
in the Gospel
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re-forming our thoughts to the thoughts of Jesus cannot be
accomplished in a short amount of time—we have to keep at
it, every day, and a quality amount of time every day
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2,
God knows more than we do
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God will give us the good things that we need in order to make
ourselves more like the Jesus whom we want to imitate
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and 3,
the prayer should begin to change us to be better people right
now
- in the words of Paul to the Colossians, our connection
with God has brought us to life, and therefore, one concludes,
we ought to act like it
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so that we begin to be a little kinder to people
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we begin to spend more time with the family
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we begin to condemn the evil which is around us,
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we offer our time and money to do something about that evil
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we support the missions or send money to help the people who
are in need
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we take a more active role in our young peoples’ lives
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we recognize the need for Catholic education of young people
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we treat the person we’re married to with a little more
respect and love
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in short, we involve ourselves in the most difficult thing
there is to do in this world: change ourselves
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I don’t think there would be an argument from too many
Christian people when a person says that we are involved in a
spiritual war
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the argument comes in what we do about it
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the Christian activists say: go out and do--, but that’s
only part of it
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the essence of the spiritual battle
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is to work from within
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we must change ourselves, and really work at changing
ourselves first
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and we have the perfect means to do it in Christian circles
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prayer—prayer which is primarily founded on looking at what
Jesus was and what he stood for, and asking his help to
acquire his thought
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If everyone of us would spend 15 minutes reading the New
Testament every day, and thinking about it, we could win the
spiritual war that is currently being waged
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because we would come to understand what we
have
to do for ourselves and for our world.
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