TRANSCRIPT:
You know, I was thinking today about the war in Heaven and how that war continues to rage today for reasons we really can’t understand. God permits Lucifer’s rebellion to continue, mostly through us, and we were baptized into that war through our baptism, right? Our joining of the war- maybe on the word of our parents at our baptism, if we were children, or as adults. We became part of that army. And those of us that were confirmed are now adult, full members in that war, right?
We’re part of the army of God. And most of the time the war we’re fighting is against ourselves. Because of our diminished intellect and our dulled will, our biggest enemy usually is ourselves. So, we’re always fighting against that. And of course, our daily prayer and our fasting and our acts of charity and penance are part of the way we’re training for that battle, and it’s also part of the way that we are waging the war.
But we’re also at war with the world and all of those temptations that come to us through our engagement with other people, the things we consume with our eyes and our ears, and even the food that we take into our bodies, the drink and so forth. And then finally, we’re at war with the devil. And you know, there’s a tradition that just as our Lord has assigned to each of us a Guardian Angel, that Satan has assigned a demon to each of us. So that third of the Angelic hosts who fell from Heaven, they have an active role in our lives, right? They are there to oppose our Guardian Angel, to tempt us, and so forth.
And so when we look at the world and we look at this war and we realize that there really is a battle between good and evil- and we’re on, hopefully, the good side- it helps me to reflect on that kind of militaristic, warlike sort of thinking to remember that these things that were supposed to be doing every day, they’re not just desirable things, they’re not just good things we should be doing if we’re serious, they are actually the duties of a soldier. And to the extent that we fail at any given moment or any day, we’re actually derelict in our duty, and the one who suffers- principally- is us. God doesn’t really suffer when we fail to do what’s in our best interest, we do; and maybe our spouses, maybe our children, and those that we’re responsible to. And the Church Militant at large fails.
So, thinking about these things in this way helps me to have an urgency about them. It helps me to remember that it’s not just, “Oh, I want to be a saint one day.” We’re in a battle, and some battles are won and some battles are lost. Every day is a battle, and at the end of the day, the battle is concluded. Will we win the battle today? Will we have done our part in the overall war? Or will we have lost the battle and, in a sense, been a traitor? Something to think about.