This Sunday the Epistle (JAS 1:22-27) calls us to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” Wiser men than I dive into the readings reminding us, we cannot come to this banquet of life and walk away unchanged.

From this altar we receive the substance of everlasting life, but it is all vanity if it is show with no action. It is deception to say I believe, I receive, but I will not do as told with the gifts given.

This is the hard part of being a practicing Catholic. The peace once gets when you can quiet your soul to be at one with Christ in the Eucharist is intense. Frankly, I do not want to leave this safe space. But our earthly life is in constant motion forward in time.

We cannot live as Christ did without stepping out into a world which hates us. The next meal, the next job, the next family care need calls us when the clock ticks forward.

This world hates the Christ, and will hate us for being torchbearers for him in the world. Living in perfect peace with the world will never happen. There will always be tension, because the world despises his calls for us to unite our sufferings to him, to reject the extremes of comfort, to give of ourselves so others may live.

So what consolation do we have? Know the great saint of old felt the same tug and still said,”Religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation, and to keep one’s self unspotted from this world.”

So as the Infantryman in me would sing…”Pickup you cross boys and follow me, we’re Christ’s Infantry.” Onward into the world we go, being doers of the Word.

-ehw