The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
Several years back, I found myself mired in an anxious depression—overtaken by a fear of death so profound that I wanted to die to escape it. Each day freighted my body with a buzzing lethargy and a whirling apathy. I was so certain that this madness signified the end of everything good that for a time I did nothing at all to try to rescue my soul. I was alive to the echoes of a calling and attentive to the movements of my heart, but I knew not what any of it meant.
Today's Gospel implores us not only to be attentive to signs—"in the sun, the moon, and the stars... the roaring of the sea and its waves"—but also to see our trials in the greater context of our redemption in the Lord's coming. We must, Jesus tells us, "stand erect and raise [our] heads... pray that you have the strength... to stand before the Son of Man." By nature, we seem to be well-attuned to our own trials and how they affect our lives. Who, after all, cannot recall a time when everything seemed to be going wrong for them? However, to respond by raising our heads does not seem to come as naturally to any of us.
Our challenge, then—and our call from Christ—is not to let our trials and tribulations strike us as ends-in-themselves. The proper response, cultivated in prayer, is to turn our downcast eyes heavenward, to place our suffering at the foot of the cross in anticipation of Christ's return. We must overcome the anxiety by remaining aware that we are not awaiting some small turn of fortunes but the second coming of Christ the King.
In this way, each struggle plays a part in forming our heart for the final cataclysm that will "catch [us] by surprise... assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth."
At the time of my own mental anguish, a woman who would become my wife was walking the Camino in search of what the Lord had in store for a life that had not gone the way she'd expected. Upon reaching Finisterre—the end of the earth—she found on the cliff overlooking the unknown world a new resolve to pursue whatever God would provide her.
On the other side of the ocean, I finally lifted my eyes back to our Lord and entrusted him with my suffering. Healing followed soon after, and I pray that we all have the strength to do the same when the world is weighted down by dismay and fright as the Son of Man arrives in a cloud of power and great glory.
Daniel Gray is a teacher and writer living in Central Texas. An adult convert to Catholicism, he loves his faith-filled and inspiring wife, Regina, his toddler son, Ezra, and his soon-to-be-born daughter, whose unknown name is a source of great prognostication. He writes short reflections on the Catholic life at Backward Progress.