Begin Again, Fight the Fight

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

St. Paul says, “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race…I look forward to the prize”

(2 Tim. 4:7-8). In this way, St. Paul speaks about having an athletic spirit, fighting the good fight, and finishing the race.

This meditation is about beginning again—getting up when we fall, having a lot of optimism, and having before our mind the picture of Christ on the way to Calvary.

He fell down three times, but He didn't stay down. He got up again. That can be very important for our Christian life.

We might wonder why God allows certain weaknesses in our lives, why certain things happen, why temptations come.

Sometimes the will of God is there behind those temptations. He allows the devil to tempt us, partly to show us how weak we are, and how we have the wound of original sin.

We have a wounded human nature, and therefore we are inclined to evil. In order to fight against that evil, we have to put in that good fight that St. Paul talks about—on a human level, avoiding occasions of sin, fighting the temptation; but also on a supernatural level, confiding in grace, praying, seeking help from above, because we know that on our own, we can't manage it.

In Ireland, the country that I come from, there used to be, and maybe there still is, an awful lot of alcoholism. Many priests would preach about the dangers of alcohol.

You may have heard the story about the priest who brought to the pulpit one day a bottle of whiskey and a live worm. He decided to allow the live worm to fall into the bottle of whiskey and show people what happens to the worm.

The whiskey, which is acidic, made the worm all shrivel up and die. He showed people, “Look, this is what happens to your insides with whiskey. This is the damage that it does.”

After the homily, he was very happy that things had gone well. He had this very graphic description.

But after the Mass, in the Sacristy, a man came and said, “Father, I wonder if I could have the bottle of whiskey because you see, I'm full of worms.”

One thing you can say about that man is that he knew what he was like on the inside. It's very important for us to know what we're like on the inside.

Fulton Sheen says there are three persons inside each one of us: the person that other people see, the person that we see, and the person that God sees.

All the time we have to be trying to see that third person, which is how we are in reality.

“Humility is truth” (St. Teresa of Ávila). We can ask God for the grace to see ourselves as He sees us; therefore, to be able to recognize the bad things that are there on the inside.

Our Lord has warned us, “Out of the human heart come all sorts of ugly things—envy, jealousy, anger, lust, gluttony” (Matt. 15:19).

We all know what it means to say that we have lust coming out of the human heart, and it finds various expressions.

But we have the grace to be able to conquer. Christ won that grace on the Cross. When we commit sin—we also know the experience of sin. It doesn't make us happy.

That's probably why you're listening to this short meditation, because you're not happy. You're fed up, you're looking for something, you want to change your life.

Sin is the only real evil in the world. It's the only thing we really have to flee from.

The grace of God washes away the sins in our souls and helps us to live by what is right.

Happiness comes from doing what is right. Misery comes from doing what is wrong. When we commit sin, we're miserable.

But we have the solution for those sins. For Catholics, we can go to the Sacrament of Confession and confess our sins. It's a wonderful way.

And also, non-Catholics can also go to Confession. They can't receive the absolution, but they can confess their sins.

I know many non-Catholics who come to just confess their sins because they want to get them off their chest, to tell someone about them. That alone alleviates the burden—to get out all the garbage that we have inside.

Somebody said once that we should think of the priest in the confessional box like the garbage can. You go there to empty the garbage and that cleanses us on the inside.

But sometimes it takes a bit of an effort because our sins can be very embarrassing, can be very shameful, but yet, often God wants us to have that humility of talking about those things.

We can also always go to Confession anonymously, the priest not knowing who we are, and get those things off our chest. That can fill us with a great joy.

The Sacrament of Confession is “the sacrament of joy” (Pope Francis, Address to Young People, September 14, 2021) and for Catholics, we can get grace into our soul, which is like the fragrance of Christ.

It helps us to begin again, to start over, to realize the battle is worthwhile, and to have a mentality like Eliud Kipchoge.

When the race starts, he is focused on the finishing line. He is focused on breaking the record. He doesn't look back or he doesn't go back. He keeps going.

And we all know many great athletes who perhaps have had a fall or something in the middle of a race, but they get up and they continue. That's the manly thing to do. It's the sporting thing to do—not to stay down, to get up again, to go forward because we know it's worthwhile.

With that acquisition of virtue, we learn to be a human person, to be in control of our passions, not to be swayed by every wind that blows.

This is part of manliness, fortitude, backbone.

Possibly, someday, God wants to use us to show those virtues to other people, so that we can teach them how to be more manly; to have more fortitude, more courage; to fight the atmosphere or environment in which they may live; to give a greater example; to have a cleaner heart and cleaner soul, which gets reflected in our face, in our eyes.

“Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). That helps us then to lead a life that's worthy of human beings, not like something else.

I heard a priest who used to hear Confessions in downtown New York, Father Benedict Groeschel. He has a number of books, and he talks about how all addictions in the world can be overcome with prayer and with sacrifice.

It’s very encouraging to hear a priest in the middle of New York, who must hear all sorts of addictions, saying that they can all be overcome. Great optimism.

We can be full of that same optimism—but at the same time realize that we have to struggle. A man who is an alcoholic—and we all have all types of addictions: to our laziness, to our comfort, to movies, to pornography, to alcohol, to whatever it may be—the guy who is an alcoholic, before he starts to leave his office, he's got to plan his journey home.

If he comes out of the car park of the office building and turns right and goes to a certain space, he knows there's a hotel there and there's a bar there, and Mr. Walker is waiting, waiting on the shelf.

As his battle starts, as he plans his journey home, ‘I know I've got to turn left when I come driving out of the parking space of the office building and keep myself on the right track.’

Sometimes that battle can be every hour, or every minute of every hour, or in some places he might be at a cocktail party or a reception where all the alcohol is free, and he has to be on his guard all the more.

There are certain moments when he can't let his guard down for a moment. When St. Paul says, “I fought the good fight…I finished the race” that's the sort of fight he wants us to fight.

There's a story told about a snail that was going through a field one time. As the snail went through the field, he left behind him a dirty, filthy, slimy trail.

In that field, there was a stone slab, a flat stone slab, commemorating some event in human history.

When the snail came to the stone slab, he continued his journey. He traversed the stone slab.

When he got to the other side of the slab, he looked back and saw the dirty, filthy, slimy trail that he had left on the stone slab.

The snail said to himself, ‘Fantastic, I have left my mark on human history!’

When it comes to the end of our life and we look back, what are we going to see? What sort of a trail do we want to leave?

An awful lot of that depends on how we live our lives now.

Some people think that old age makes you holy. Somebody said once, “Wisdom sometimes comes with age, and age sometimes comes alone” (Oscar Wilde).

I can tell you that purity and chastity and modesty don't come with age. We have to win those battles when we're young, like all the other battles against our laziness, our bourgeois spirit, or all the other passions that may assail us.

Now is the time to fight. Now is the time to be victorious. Now is the time to learn to acquire good habits. A habit is a repeated good act, and a repeated habit is a virtue.

We could try and live our lives with virtues, to be a great human person, so that we can build great families and build up great children, to build a great civilization. That's the goal of our life.

For any Christian or any human being of goodwill, it's a battle worth fighting because the stakes are fantastic.

We should try and use all the means we have. Any great athlete—any Eliud Kipchoge or anybody else—has a coach.

Very often you find that the great footballers or the great athletes pay an awful lot of attention to their coach. That coach gives them a right little pointer here and there, maybe a word, maybe an idea, focus on this, focus on that.

That coach is indispensable. I saw a documentary on Usain Bolt recently and he travels with a team of people to advise him.

We also need a coach if we're going to fight this big battle—somebody who understands us that we can go to and say all the terrible things that are going through our mind.

When a priest hears somebody coming and saying all the garbage, all the rubbish, terrible things, embarrassing, shameful things, the priest doesn't call the police and say, Lock this guy up!

He says, “This guy is trying to be holy.”

The priest also has a wounded human nature. He's been through all those things. He knows what this guy is talking about. He knows what he's looking for: a few words of encouragement and the grace of God.

We're all the same. We all have the same wounded human nature.

When somebody comes to the priest and talks like that, the priest knows, “This guy is serious. He wants to be better and I'm here to be his coach a little bit, to encourage him week by week and maybe, day by day.”

The important thing is to live the life of grace. Whenever you lose the life of grace, I tell people to try and get back into the state of grace within 24 hours.

See, sometimes we see the Eliud Kipchoges in the last hundred meters of the race, breaking the tape, breaking the record.

But we don't see them running over the hills of Eldoret at five o'clock in the morning when it's raining, and maybe slipping and falling, and feeling lousy, and feeling discouraged when they have to fight the good fight to get to the top of the mountain, or to break the record, to do it a bit faster every time or put more effort.

That's what our struggle for virtue is all about.

We have Our Mother Mary, the Mediatrix of all graces, who has given us the means: prayer, the Memorare, the Rosary, so many other supernatural means to help us “to fight the good fight.”

Mother, help me to hang in there, to keep fighting, to begin again, to see that the goal is worthwhile. “I look forward to the prize.”

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

OLV