Following Christ

Father Paul Pecchie

Christ has never stopped breaking down barriers, because he always has at least a few faithful followers at work in the world. One of these is a Franciscan Friar from Egypt named Fr Ibrahim He lives in Jerusalem, a city in the middle of a part of the world that seems to be constantly in strife, constantly divided, constantly erupting into violence that makes the divisions deeper.

Fr Ibrahim is following Christ by healing those divisions. Here’s how he is doing it. 1700 years ago, the Roman Emperor Constantine built a massive Church over the site of Calvary and Christ’s tomb: the Holy Sepulcher. Fr Ibrahim has turned an ancient, cavernous room in the basement of that ancient church into a basketball court and gymnasium. It’s where he has the meetings of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. He started chapters of the Scouts in order to give Christian young people an alternative to hopelessness, violence, and drugs.

The Christian Scouts come together upstairs to pray and receive the sacraments, and then they go downstairs to burn off energy, squelch their anger, build friendships, and exercise the virtues of hope, forgiveness, and self-respect.

And guess what? Guess who Fr Ibrahim has invited to join them in their search for hope? Muslim Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. And Jewish Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. In this time of hatred and anger and killing of innocents, Christian, Muslim and Jewish teenagers talk, listen to music, and play together under the very spot where Christ gave his life to redeem the whole human family and initiate his conquest of prejudice, anger and hatred among men.

Two thousand years ago, Christ was bringing masters and slaves into the same family of faith, setting the stage for the eventual abolition of slavery. Today, through faithful followers like Fr Ibrahim, he’s still healing the divisions caused by sin.

What barriers are still up in our lives? None of us is a perfect Christian yet – when we get to that point the Lord will take us home to heaven. Today, the Church is inviting us to examine our hearts sincerely, calmly, to see what grudges we still hold and what prejudices we bear.

Is there an individual in our life that we are not treating as a brother, but as a slave, or as an enemy? Christ died for that person. Is there a whole group of people that we resent, that makes us mad just to think about? Christ died for them too. These barriers of resentment, anger, and prejudice are like giant weeds growing in the garden of our souls.

They steal the nutrients that are meant to feed virtues like wisdom, courage, and generosity – the kind of virtues
that produce interior peace and lasting happiness. They grow around our hearts like vines grow around trees – sucking
the Christian life out of us, making us fall into the convenient back-talking, gossiping, criticizing, and destructive atti
tudes of division that make this world such a valley of sorrows. Christ’s grace is the most powerful weed killer ever in
vented.

He wants to use it to free us from these parasites, so that our lives can flourish more and more. Today, let us allow Him to apply it to our hearts. Let us ask Him to give us a heart like His, a heart like Paul’s, that can turn runaway slaves into brothers. Let us not leave this Church without having decided that we will welcome the Onesimuses in our lives as brothers. I can think of few things that would please our Lord more than that.

Oremus pro Invicem!