The Perks of Travelling With a Guy in a Cassock

I was sitting at the kitchen table this morning, daydreaming and looking out the window, while my English assignment lay, for that moment, forgotten before me. I was watching two hummingbirds dance through the outside garden, their bright neon-coloured feathers glinting in the sunlight. These beautiful, flitting creatures got me thinking.

Coming back from the mission trip, I had five flights from Piura to home. For the first two flights I traveled with the rest of the group to Miami, and from there we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. It just so happened that I had two of the same flights as CJ, a fifth year seminarian who came with us on the mission. It was quite the experience, travelling with a guy in a cassock.

I think that sometimes it can be easy to start despairing about the condition that our world is in, and how messed up it is. But travelling with a guy in a cassock helped me realize and discover much of the goodness this world has to offer, and to see things which I wouldn't have otherwise seen. It's kind of like this whole underground movement... which is quite amazing when you discover it. However, I believe that it's about time that us Catholics stopped going underground. We need to start being more open about our faith.  Not nearly as many people will have their curiosity sparked if we are not obviously different from everyone else, and clear about what we stand for. So many neat things happened with CJ, such as random people asking him questions, and strangers coming up to him and introducing themselves. They were all positive responses, too.

He had this one awesome conversation in an airport hair salon/shoe-shining place with three black people who sounded like they were from Mississippi. The conversation was all about the ideas our culture has about homosexuality and all the problems it's creating. One guy said (and you can imagine this being said in a Southern accent), “It just don't make no sense! The parts don't fit!”

Anyway, do you see my point? If CJ hadn't been wearing his cassock, and wasn't being so obviously different from everyone else, these things would never have happened. By being more open about our faith, we're also showing others that it's okay to do so, and you don't need to be afraid or ashamed of being Catholic. We also can't despair about the state of this world – we must have hope in the goodness that still exists. Honestly, though, there is no point in getting depressed and sad about how messed up things are. That's only adding to our problems! Indeed, we must always have hope, and while living this life of hope we can spread it to others.

The pair of hummingbirds I was watching this morning were what inspired this post. Hummingbirds are such pretty little things - at first they don't seem to have a lot of colour, but then all of a sudden, when light glints off of their feathers, you see a dazzling array of colours. They go from flower to flower, collecting pollen, and then in turn the flowers gain life. This is what we have to do with ourselves - use the grace that God gives us and do our very best to spread it around to others. If we despair, if we think there isn't any point in trying, our grace will die out - our colours will fade. Also, there is much more beauty and goodness out there than you might first think, like I discovered while travelling with CJ. Besides, it's not as bad as Athanasius had it - back in his day, it was just him against the world. And guess what: the church still survived. The church has survived through all the major empires of the past 2000 years. All because we've got Christ on our side. Now isn't that an awesome reality.

"I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something."

"What are we holding onto, Sam?" 

"That there's some good in this world, Mr Frodo... and it's worth fighting for."