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A Reflective Prayer of One Who Wants to Stay in the Church
Lord
I want to be where you are. When you walked this earth you were criticized because you “ate and drank with sinners.” You forgave Peter who denied you; you asked your Father to forgive those who crucified you. If to be with you means to “sit with sinners” and be associated with the lowly, so be it. Your saints make up that “Cloud of Witnesses” that preceded us into heaven. These witnesses lived side-by-side with all kinds of people: those who were famous, and the infamous; scoundrels and saints. They were not exempt from rubbing elbows with criminals and outcasts, philosophers and the very simple. They believed, as I believe, that each person was created by you out of love. Each one with whom they lived was capable of heights of sanctity as well as depths of depravity. You offered each one your grace and your sacraments in this Church—this mysterious blend of human and divine, of the eternal and the things of the moment, the mortal and the immortal.
T
oday more than ever the words of the great theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar ring true, “The collection of sinners in the Church, to which we all belong, has acted more or less idiotically in all ages of the Church.” 1 A fellow theologian, Henri de Lubac, used St. Augustine’s keen description of the members of the Church: “Even the best of her children are never any more than in the way of sanctification, and their sanctity is always liable to shipwreck; all alike have to flee from the evil of the times to the mercy of God.” 2
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Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, Elucidations, p. 309, Ignatius Press, 1998, San Francisco. De Lubac, The Splendour of the Church, p. 68, 1963, Paulist Press, Glen Rock, N. J.