Thoughts for the Journey Home by Grodi Marcus

Author:Grodi, Marcus [Grodi, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Conversion -- Catholic Church, Catholic converts
Publisher: CHResources
Published: 2012-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 32 -- Drooping Hands and Weak Knees

Several years ago my oldest son, Jon Marc, and I had the privilege of visiting sites associated with the lives of the English martyrs. We stood in the halls of Oxford where St. Edmund Campion and others had studied while they were discerning God's call for their lives. (Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman had studied there as well.) We stood outside Lyford Grange, the house where Campion was celebrating a secret Mass when he was betrayed, arrested, and taken to the Tower of London.

We toured the Tower of London and saw the prison cells with the inscriptions of St. Philip Howard, St. Thomas More, and St. John Fisher. We also saw the block upon which they were beheaded. We visited Arundel Castle, a center for recusant Catholics in the years after the Reformation. (The recusants were the English Catholics of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries who refused to attend the services of the Church of England or to recognize its authority.)

All these sites stood as a sobering reminder to me. I sometimes tell myself that I sacrificed a great deal in giving up my pastorate to enter the Catholic Church. But then I consider what other men and women gave up, martyrs such as Edmund Campion, John Southworth, Margaret Clitherow, Margaret Ward, Thomas Becket, Thomas More, and John Fisher. I realize that my own sacrifices and worries pale in comparison. These men and women were driven to sacrifice all in defense of the Church they loved.

I stood on the coast near the place where Edmund Campion and others secretly came back into England, knowing what would face them there. The words of Hebrews 12 became clear to me in a new way:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

And have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons? "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him. For the Lord disciplines him whom He loves, and chastises every son whom he receives."

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? ...

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. ...

Therefore lift your drooping hands and

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