Storm's comin'

So, this week, following my trip to Rome, I deactivated my work-related Facebook account. A while ago I separated my working contacts and groups - people and organisations that send me information that I pour into my work - from my contacts with personal friends, people I actually know and want to keep in touch with. I have been collecting stuff on the personal FB account that have nothing whatever to do with The News. Mostly stuff about gardening, science, botany, herbalism, archaeology and monasticism.

One day Facebook sent me some kind of weird thing where it showed you what you posted exactly seven years ago. It was a photo album of my first visit to Rome. For some reason, it made me kind of freak out. My reaction was not, perhaps, what FB intended. I put up the briefest possible note saying I was retiring the account, and I clicked it. It's off. The other one, the personal one that's full of stuff about herbal remedies and gardening tips, is still going.

I'm not entirely sure what is happening in my brain at the moment, but I just can't look at the other stuff. Day after day of scrolling up and down that newsfeed and I felt myself diminishing, eroding, almost fizzling away. Finally, I realised that I have to make a choice between activism and a new thing. I was at Mass on Wednesday morning in Norcia after my long weekend in Rome, and it came home to me with great clarity: choose.

As my buddy Steve says below, we certainly seem to be entering a time of persecution and diminishment. It's going to be a testing time, particularly, I think, in the next six to eight months. I'm not saying anything "prophetic," I'm just reading the signs of the times. Suddenly, the reason I came to Norcia is becoming more important than anything else.

Listen to this podcast from my old friend Steve Skojec. It more or less says what I think:

"I can’t do my job — trying to get the truth, which is often unpopular, in the hands of as many people as possible — without living in a constant state of promotion. But this works against the very virtues I believe we must extol."

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O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved...
From the desire of being extolled ...
From the desire of being honored ...
From the desire of being praised ...
From the desire of being preferred to others...
From the desire of being consulted ...
From the desire of being approved ...
From the fear of being humiliated ...
From the fear of being despised...
From the fear of suffering rebukes ...
From the fear of being calumniated ...
From the fear of being forgotten ...
From the fear of being ridiculed ...
From the fear of being wronged ...
From the fear of being suspected ...

That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be esteemed more than I ...
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease ...
That others may be chosen and I set aside ...
That others may be praised and I unnoticed ...
That others may be preferred to me in everything...
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should…



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