Unfinished Business

I have looked at the theme of perfection for three years, as if I were examining a many-faceted prism, or jewel. One reads the great mystics and theologians, as well as the Doctors of the Church, noticing the multi-colored spectrums of the words of the saints.

I have shared charts and graphs, photos and paintings, words which seem to purify the imagination as one writes them.

I have quoted the great ones on memory, understanding, the will, the imagination, detachment, objectivity, reflection, meditation, contemplation and the various stages of beginners and proficients.

I have written about Love and shared many poems about love, as well as giving hints as to how to supernaturalizing the natural and naturalizing the supernatural.

As I leave Iowa, the place of my birth and my home until I was a young adult, a place to which I have returned several times, I now realize that I may never return here again. This awareness of time and memory, birth and death, growth and decay bring me to a place where I sit in the sun, near twilight, and wonder at the movements of God in my life.

Unlike most people’s lives, my life has been one of change, excitement, living in many strange and wonderful places, my soul and mind being formed by interesting and good people, with whom I have been blessed to meet.

My closest friends are scattered across America and Europe. They are not gathered in one place, nor sit and look at the sun from the same angle as I do this evening.

Some, at this moment, are swimming in the land of the Middle Sea. They may be on their way to Mass and the rosary.  Some are having tea or early dinner in the green valleys or near the white cliffs of England, or in the deep countryside of mist and flowers in Ireland. Some are rushing to Vespers in London and in Cobh.

Some are in the busy cities of London, or Dublin, or Sliema, busy running, swimming, working, praying. Some are in sleepy little villages along the southern coast of England, overlooking the Channel, to where some work and play in the Vendee.

Over all these people is the mantle of grace, the grace of commitment to being part of the remnant and the Church Militant. Over all these people is the mantle of Mary, Our Mother, who loves each one of us as her own. I have met so many members of the remnant and consider myself blessed, very blessed.

But, as I begin to pack and move, I am saddened at leaving behind unfinished business, Business which is the evangelization of some of who nearest and dearest to me and unfinished as I have to leave them yet again without seeing the conversions for which I pray daily.

So many of us have members in our families who have either left the Church or never have been Christian. Many readers ask me to pray for family members. I do, and for my own.

Did St. Paul have relatives? We hear nothing of his brothers, his sisters, his parents….

When he went out to the cities of the Empire, did he know people there first, or did he land as a stranger and have to make friends as he began communities?

I have a missionary heart, as I have shared on this blog before. My heart is with the people in Europe, who face a darkness which will cover the earth very soon.

They will feel the brunt of this first, but, perhaps, not the worst. America as a younger and more zealous nation will be harsher, more violent, more organized in persecution, playing with the darkness of evil power like an adolescent with a new, fast car, but without the skills to drive it.

My twilight days are coming upon me, but I desire to work in the dusk. The dim light does not hinder my zealous nature. My angels go before me preparing a way to new friends, new places.

Continue to pray for me, please, as I move out of this area of giant farms, stout-hearted, but too proud people, and too much ostentatious wealth as well as deep poverty. May God continue to bless the people of the Midwest, but may He give them new graces to open their eyes to what is around them, but what they are not seeing--the coming night of Western Civilization.