We here at St. Anthony Messenger and Franciscan Media are also taking this opportunity—and the words of St. Francis—to heart. Considering the magazine’s 127-year history, I would hardly say that up until now we’ve “done little or nothing.”

But that also doesn’t mean we should stop looking for ways to get better every year—every month, in fact. As the world and Church change, so must we. And we will.

That is why in the upcoming year, we will be challenging ourselves to grow, change, and embark on new ways to share God’s love in the spirit of St. Francis in these pages. That change might come in the shape of new columns, the articles and subjects we print, or new voices in our pages. At the heart of all these things, however, will continue to be you—our readers.

On a wider scale, we will also be expanding our digital offerings at FranciscanMedia.org later in the year to include a new daily prayer resource. Pause+Pray will join our stable of offerings—Saint of the Day, Minute Meditations, and others—to help you grow your faith.

As we welcome the new year, let us all take this opportunity to “begin again.”

1. The Annunciation. The angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she is to be the Mother of our Savior. Mary humbly asks an honest question: “How can this be since I am a virgin?” The angel responds, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” Mary answers simply: “Behold, I am the Handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Humility and trust pervade Mary’s entire attitude before God. Mother Mary, help us imitate your example.

2. The Visitation. Mary enters the house of her cousin Elizabeth. At the sound of her greeting, the infant leaps in Elizabeth’s womb. Elizabeth says to Mary: “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” And so we are inspired not only by Mary’s humility but by her absolute trust that what the Lord promised would indeed come about. If John the Baptist—in Elizabeth’s womb—leaped for joy at the arrival of Mary, we too should find cause for joy when we come to pray before the Mother of God.

3. The Nativity. At the decree of Caesar Augustus, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem to be enrolled. There Mary gives birth to her firstborn son, wrapping him in swaddling clothes and laying him in a manger. Consider the humility of Mary on the one hand—and the humility of the Son of God on the other. In one of his sermons, St. Anthony of Padua expressed awe at the humility of God: “The Lord of the Universe is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lays . . . in a narrow manger.” May all of us seek to imitate the humility of Mary—and of God!

4. The Presentation. Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem to consecrate him to the Lord. There, a devout and righteous man named Simeon was awaiting “the consolation of Israel. It had been revealed to Simeon . . . that he should not see death before he had seen the Messiah of the Lord.” Simeon said, “Behold, this child is destined for the rise and fall of many in Israel, and to be a sign that shall be contradicted.” Along with Simeon, we too have been introduced to the long-awaited Messiah. May the Holy Spirit show us how to welcome and respond to him!

5. The Finding of the Child Jesus. After a trip to Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus had accidentally been left behind. Returning, they find Jesus in the Temple, listening to the teachers and asking questions. Mary says to him, “Son, why have you done this to us?” Jesus answers, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” In family life today, we also find that we can run into conflicts when faced with confusing priorities. Ultimately whose will must we follow? The will of our parents? Or the will of our heavenly Father? Again, we will certainly need wisdom from the Holy Spirit.

Next Month: The Sorrowful Mysteries

That said, I do not have a huge following. I have never had a post go viral or even make a measurable impact beyond an extended circle of friends. Nevertheless, if you stay around social media long enough, you will say something that will catch the attention of someone, and the likelihood is high that you will eventually be attacked. Given the circles in which I travel, the attack usually comes from someone who identifies as a Christian.

Recently, I made a comment on a Twitter thread about religious freedom. I mentioned the Murfreesboro, Tennessee, mosque controversy—an example of Christians using politics to block Muslims from building a worship space in a town about an hour south of Nashville.

That’s when I got the response mentioned above, telling me I was pathetic. Then, in the following tweet, the same commenter invited me to accept Jesus. (It is not clear if the person thought I was an unbeliever or just didn’t like the fact that I am Roman Catholic.)

Hollow Words

I wasn’t always Catholic, and I wasn’t always Christian. In fact, until my mid-20s, I was an atheist, despite having grown up in the deeply religious Bible Belt of South Georgia. Years ago, when I was a freshman in high school, there was a senior who spent the entire year bullying and insulting me. I’m still not entirely sure why he didn’t like me, but he let me know just about every single day.

At the end of the school year, I attended graduation. I was there to cheer for several of my friends. After the ceremony, I turned around to find myself face-to-face with this senior who had bullied me throughout the year.

I will never forget the exchange that followed. He looked at me and said: “David, I’m part of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I’m a Christian. I want you to know that Christ is the most important thing in my life, and I hope you will invite him into your heart.”

A moment like that might be awkward under the best of circumstances, but literally every prior interaction I had with this young man had been one in which he had teased me, insulted me, or threatened my safety. Now, suddenly, he was testifying to me about his faith. I looked at him, unable to think of anything to say. I just shook my head and walked away.

A Mixed Message

There is a quote often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “The deeds you do may be the only sermon some persons will hear today.” It is important to evangelize. But if prior interactions have been laced with hate, violence, or calumny, we should expect nothing but indifference to the Gospel we proclaim.

This is especially true if we have the audacity to inflict pain with our words and actions one moment and shout the name of Jesus the next. In our haste to maintain the pure borders of our faith, we risk confusing God’s righteousness with our own.

There is no quick fix for the hurts and harm we cause, and it is no excuse to say we were simply being zealous for the Lord. What is required is contrition and repentance—in private if we must—coupled with a public gesture of making amends with the ones who have been harmed by our actions. That is the only bridge that will carry the weight of the Gospel.

That remark may perfectly sum up the public persona Parton has created: comical, self-deprecating, and wholly relatable. From certain angles, it’s also a ruse. Underneath the garish wigs is the mind of a brilliant businesswoman, strategist, and storyteller—in fact, her songwriting prowess has been compared to contemporaries Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. But who is Dolly Parton?

The same question haunts producer Jad Abumrad, and he’s using his insightful podcast, Dolly Parton’s America, to find the answer. Born the fourth of 12 children in a one-room cabin in East Tennessee along the Great Smoky Mountains, Parton’s early life was a country song before she could write them. But her humble beginnings belied a fierce ambition and talent that put her miles ahead of her country music colleagues.

Abumrad takes his time covering his subject’s successes—from her 3,000 songs, to her two entries in the Guinness World Records, to her popular theme park—but his central question is one he knows will never be fully answered: Why, at a time in our country when one’s worth seems defined by one’s political leanings, does everybody love Dolly Parton?

Using his mic like a photojournalist’s camera, the funny and formidable Abumrad seeks to capture the real Dolly. And he doesn’t avoid the tough questions, such as whether Parton’s seminal hit “Jolene” has traces of homoeroticism; why she won’t publicly bash President Donald Trump; and why she has become a kind of godmother to her LGBTQ admirers. Mindful of preserving her diverse fan base, Parton knows how to use her countrified charm to dodge questions that may alienate them.

But Abumrad seems preternaturally aware that Parton’s image is both precious and precarious—and this Country Music icon isn’t going to tarnish it. Parton, despite the fame and riches, wants desperately to maintain her relatable image, that of a down-home country girl working 9 to 5.

As a prayer coach, St. Francis de Sales encourages us to jump in and swim in the grace of God.

Jane de Chantal (1572–1641), early modern French cofounder of the women’s religious congregation the Visitation of Holy Mary, is quoted as claiming that “the best method of prayer is to have no method at all.” In retrospect, her claim appears somewhat ironic in that Jane, along with her cofounder Francis de Sales (1567–1622), Bishop of Geneva and popular spiritual author from the duchy of Savoy, both promoted a wide variety of prayer practices.

These two spiritual friends are at the fountainhead of the larger spiritual family known as Salesian. While it was mainly the bishop’s writings, especially the Introduction to the Devout Life and the Treatise of the Love of God, through which the Salesian perspective originally was, and still continues to be, disseminated, the congregation of the Visitation that the two founded in 1610 was, for several centuries, the chief institutional bearer of the Salesian charism.

Until the mid-twentieth century, Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life was the most frequently read spiritual guide in the Catholic world. It continues in the present day to be frequently reprinted and adapted for contemporary Christian readers.

As a man prompted by early modern Catholic reforming zeal, de Sales believed that God desired intimacy with ordinary men and women as well as with those in professed religious life. The Devout Life was written for such as these with the assumption that they, who had long been assumed to be less spiritually capable than their vowed peers, long to learn how to respond to the divine desire that stirs deep in the human heart. Prayer is one of the chief avenues of response to the divine initiative.

The Devout Life assumes that its reader comes to personal prayer in the larger context of Christian sacramental practice. The bishop describes prayer as necessary for anyone who longs to grow in God’s love as prayer clarifies the mind and draws the will by exposing it to the warmth of divine ardor. In his typically imaginative and image-rich rhetorical style, Francis writes…

[Prayer] is the water of blessing which by its watering causes the plants of our good desires to become green and to flower, washes our souls clean from their imperfections, and quenches the passions of our hearts.

All types of prayer de Sales deems important. Vocal prayers such as the Hail Mary and the Our Father are lauded. The bishop himself prayed the rosary with his episcopal household daily. But more importantly, he prompts us to move gradually into interior mental prayer focused especially on the Passion of Jesus and offers a detailed method for the aspirant who longs for a deeper awareness of the divine.

This brief method of interior meditation is recommended after we have given serious attention to purifying the soul from attachment to sin and consideration of God’s love and the true end toward which human life is appropriately directed. First, she is encouraged as she begins to pray to place herself in God’s presence, becoming aware that God is everywhere in everything, including the depths of the human heart.

Humbled by the majesty of the divine, she should ask for the grace to serve well. Then, a particular mystery (for example Jesus on the cross) is proposed to the imagination, and we are encouraged to enter the scene imaginatively in order to draw insight from it, pausing when a meditation elicits edifying response…

And if your mind finds enough flavor, light, and fruit in one of the reflections, you should stop yourself there without going any further—doing as bees do who do not leave the flower until they have gathered all the honey.

Finally, these meditative reflections should prompt affections and resolutions. The will should be moved toward impulses such as trust, zeal for heaven, compassion, or joy that then should be turned into resolutions that seek to transform affections into actions that can amend faults or encourage growth. Prayer in the Salesian tradition, even in this fairly elementary method, never remains notional but always draws the one praying toward active growth and alignment of the will with the divine prompting.

The final movements of this interior process include thanksgiving, the offering of one’s affections and resolutions, and supplication. Then, with his typically encouraging spiritual pedagogy, Francis assures that the fruits of the meditation will not fade by proposing that we collect a souvenir or “spiritual bouquet.”

_{^{Featured Image: Lawrence, OP | Flickr}}

At the end of this address, he said: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretched from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Union soldiers were forced to surrender Fort Sumter on April 13, 1861, and four more states had seceded by June 1. Lincoln could not avoid the Civil War, but he identified the standard for the discourse that our society still desperately requires.

Perhaps never have Abraham Lincoln’s words been more needed in our society’s politics, family life, our civic and charitable works, and our spiritual lives.

Reweaving Our Social Fabric

Unfortunately, few people were ready to listen to those better angels during the Civil War or in its subsequent Reconstruction period. The effects of those conflicts are painfully with us yet today. Our better angels have always had a difficult time receiving a hearing.

The authors of our Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution had a strong sense that they were trying to craft a nation that would respect the common good of its citizens, strengthening its social fabric. Of course, those authors had several blind spots: For example, the international slave trade was protected until 1808; almost a third of the people in some states then were not citizens; voting could be restricted to certain religious groups or property owners; and women could not vote until 1920.

Nevertheless, these authors set the standard that later generations would enlarge, for genuine peace must be built on justice. On Washington, DC’s National Mall on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously proclaimed: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

A sense of our country’s common good has frayed greatly during the lifetime of most St. Anthony Messenger readers. How many drivers have you seen running a red traffic light in the past week?

For several decades, sociologists, psychologists, preachers, and others have noted the fraying of our social fabric. Civil discourse becomes a rare commodity when people holding opposite viewpoints immediately resort to demonizing those on the other side.

There has also been some progress. For example, our justice system is less tilted against poor people than it used to be, but much work remains, especially for civil justice reform.

All the citizens in a democracy—not simply its elected or appointed leaders—must promote that society’s common good and contribute to reweaving its social fabric. Associate US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “In a democracy, the most important title is that of private citizen.” We cannot be good citizens—or members of any other group—if demonizing others is our preferred response to a different opinion.

Normalizing Respectful Speech

Families, schools, civic groups, and all the other vital parts of our society are under attack when an individual’s preference overrules all other concerns—at least with shouts if not with physical violence. Unfortunately, the number of racially or religiously motivated hate crimes has dramatically risen in recent years.

During local, state, and national elections this year, we all have an opportunity to rebuild or tear apart our nation’s social fabric. Our words and actions can build it up or tear it down. We can take our cues from hate groups or from neighbors whose lives of integrity show that they are trying to listen to their better angels.

Those who love freedom must embrace this challenge.