Advice to a Disheartened Man

(Found here)

Advice to a disheartened man afflicted by propagandists, liars, haters and eroders of true freedom, as he rides on a train through London, New York, Toronto, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Cairo. heading home to his own local habitation in the suburbs of Technopolis.

“So, this is the way life goes,” you think during the train ride home, your head leaning against the window, the lights of the city rolling past, millions upon millions of people living their lives as if the world had not changed.

“All is lost, lost, lost,” you think or feel. “And no one but me sees it.”

All is not lost. A very large number of people sense the underlying diabolical source of this present darkness. More and more of them see the signal beacon on the hills and hear the distant ringing of bells as they quietly go about their lives. Can you fault them for longing for peace? People in wartime strive to make small islands of normality in the midst of looming disasters. And we are surely now at war.

“But what am I to do?” you say.

You do the duty of the tasks at hand.

You keep faith with your responsibilities, your vocation.

You love the souls you’ve brought into the world, and the souls God brings into your life.

You work and you pray. You try to turn everything into prayer.

You seek the peace that the world cannot give.

And you practise hope. You keep your eyes trained on the true horizon.

“Ah, yes,” you think, “I believe that too. The practice is more difficult.”

Yes, the praxis is more difficult.

Yet in the practising, renewed again and again, your character is formed and strengthened.

In this way you become who you are.

In this way you become more than you think you are.

And in this way the balance of the world is shifted.

~Michael O’Brien (from Fragments in a Season of Fury)