It’s New Year’s Day. I usually celebrate it by going on a hike and then watching some football on TV, and this year is no exception. Fifty-degree weather in northern New England on the first of the year? Yes, please. But Mass came first.
As a Catholic, I celebrate the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God today. It’s also the World Day of Peace. That’s a lot of freight for one date to carry.
St. Josemaria Escriva is up to the task.
We have to fight – a fight of peace – against evil, against injustice, against sin. Thus do we serve notice that the present condition of man is not definitive.
St. Josemaria Escriva, collected in Christ is Passing By: Homilies, escrivaworks.org
There’s a challenge, a reminder, and reassurance all at once.
…many peoples shall come and say: “Come, let us climb the LORD’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and impose terms on many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.
Isaiah 2:2-5, NAB
Photo by Pete Linforth/Pixabay
In the Catholic liturgical year, this Advent’s readings began with the book of Isaiah, including a phrase that is among Isaiah’s most evocative: Swords into plowshares.
The first time I heard those words, I was a child in school, and I read them in an account of a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. – a speech now known as “I have a dream.” To me, Dr. King’s call to nonviolence practically set to music the words from the book of Isaiah. The message seemed clear to me: beat our swords into plowshares, and peace will follow.
Still later, reading and hearing the whole of the book of Isaiah, I came to realize that my childhood impression of swords-into-plowshares was upside down. Beating swords into plowshares isn’t a first step. It’s a consequence that can only follow from “[C]limbing the Lord’s mountain…[that] we may walk in his paths.”
Sometimes I think pounding away at the swords would be easier. And just in time, Advent is here to nudge me away from that idea, to turn my impressions upside down, and to point me to that mountain I’m supposed to climb.
Worth remembering as an election looms and my mailbox overflows and the ads reach saturation points: “policy” is a means, not an end. The former lobbyist in me needs the reminder occasionally.
Journalist Kathryn Jean Lopez always provides edifying reading, and she has often made the point that getting a bill passed is not the same as building a culture of life. She summarized it best in these words: “Our efforts can’t be confined to policy. We have to give our lives to the work of reformation, restoration, reparation, renewal. We need to see human life as the tremendous, incomparable gift that it is, and help other people see that.”
I’ll keep telling people to get to the polls. And still, I can see that our most lasting work will be accomplished during the other 364 days in the year.
Ellen Kolb 