The quality and content of our social connections shape our human capacity to accurately interpret reality and truth. To know God.
Within the last month our nation is heavy, likewise our hearts. We carry the images and stories of unimaginable violence that have inundated our news feeds and societal conversation. This does not go without consequence for our mental and spiritual affect.
The Communion of Human Persons
Perhaps the most disturbing consequence is how many have allowed the strong affectual stirrings to override any sense of solidarity and communion with those that they disagree with. We are made for communion. Division and isolation contradict our very nature. From the first moment of our existence we are communal beings dependent on our mother’s love, our father’s love of our mother, and our societies greater embrace of the family unit. When one of these break down, risk for pathology in spirit, mind, and body exponentially increases. We depend on connection.
The quality and content of our social connections shape our human capacity to accurately interpret truth. Our social connections bring us outside of our own minds to see the world outside of our limited view. Currently, many are decisively cutting off connection with those they do not agree due to discomfort. We have been groomed to create our own isolation by an ideological relativism where comfort trumps the natural law. And in isolation the mind becomes so easily infected with vice, delusion, and egocentrism.
Our Lady of Sorrows and Comfort
In this time, we may be tempted to dull discomfort by likewise acquiescing to the pervasive attitude of social disconnection. But I challenge you not too. As a Church let us sit in the discomfort that our culture has been trained to avoid. Let us look to Our Lady of Sorrows as our roadmap who bore and continues to bear the most unbearable grief of our disintegrated and divided nation. The one who stood at the foot of the cross watching her only Son suffer the most excruciating death when it would have been easier to shield her eyes. It would have been easier for her to hide out of fear. By accompanying her Son at His death, she risked her own life. What hostile words and stares did she herself endure that day?
She is the one who will introduce the world, as she did 2000 years ago, to the One whose word can provide us life and communion where there is death and division. Through the intercession of Our Lady of Sorrows, let us pray for healing and mercy in our wounded nation and hearts.
