In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. The church today has this feast of the guardian angels. There's one thing I want to bring back to your memories. There is no doctrine of the Catholic church which says we each have a single guardian angel.
There's a popular belief in that for all, and I know it may be true. I'm only saying that is not a defined doctrine. But what is a defined doctrine of the Catholic Church is that there are guardian angels. And the the Bible, the old and the new test testament, is full of it. You can't get away from it.
Although we do, we try to, just the way we get away from the idea of the devil and of Satan. But by by people who who really profess a great confidence in the Bible, in this book. But today the church is reminding us of this fact that we have guardian angels. Now I want to go back to this idea of those little children. They can be lovable and they can be very erratic, to put it mildly.
Try taking an 80 mile trip with one in a coop. But there's one thing about a small child when it's that has always, as a third party, impressed me. And that's the way they're shoved around. By that I mean, maybe that's a poor word, but it's literally the truth. Because you they have to be told where to go and they do it.
But until they get it up in the junior high, you know. Then that's a little more of a problem. But when there are blessed Lord sees me talking here about a young child, not a teenager. That's of course of another color, you'll pardon that metaphor. If, as I say, I've been impressed by the way they do at this age what they're told.
Go to the store, go upstairs, Push that chair aside. You know all kinds of things and they do it. I want to come back to Saint Teresa of Legia. Remember she she lived only twenty four, twenty five years. She went into the cotter when she was about 15.
She was there for about nine years. While she went into the Carmelite Order of Lisieux in a very cloistered house, within that devout community there was a great deal of tumult and turmoil. Factions were fighting factions after a good It keeps things alive anyway, you know. It was not an easy life for this young girl. She had two sisters there already.
Now, before she ever thought of Carmel, her first thought was to go on the missions. Just as Assisi did, Ignatius of Loyola, Dominic. That seemed to be the first impulse. To go to go way off into the Far East where there are many people who need to be saved. In other words, to flee your homeland, to go into foreign parts where you're more needed.
And that may well be true, I don't know. Anyway, it was Theresa Vlezia's first resolve to go into the foreign mission someplace. And the Carmelite came only as a secondary decision, which embraced the first. Because this young girl, far as we know, as far as I've read anything of her of her own thinking, came to the conclusion that she could best serve the missions to save souls in foreign lands by becoming a contemplative nun in behind up some stone walls in these years, or brick walls or whatever that what's there whatever's there. And that's what she did.
Not that she gave up her first resolution, but that that first resolution was incorporated in the in the decision to become a karma like nun. A completely contemplative cloistered order, which is pretty far removed from the active life of a missionary over in the Far East, especially in her time. And that is a con as I say, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine had it. St. Augustine Hippo, Ignatius Loyola, Ceci, Dominic.
They all had that. And they all, in one way or another, except St. Jerome, they came back home. And there found the work that God wanted them to do. Ignatius wandered all over France and Spain and Italy before he found out precisely what he was supposed to do, and I don't know whether it was too precise at that.
You know what I'm driving at. I'm driving at our own lies. The great temptation is to think that the job that I'm doing here and now is insignificant and unimportant, and has no value for these great movements. These worldwide efforts, you know, to change the universe, to bring in a whole new system, and all of this stuff, you know. Much of that, you know, is just waste.
Waste. I'm I'm completely a Newman man as opposed to Pusey. You know how that was when when this Oxford movement, in the last half of the nineteenth century. Here I'm going into that. But it's important to get a a good perspective of life.
And if you want to accomplish something, how do you do it? But before you talk about how do I do it, you want to be sure what you're trying to do. What are you aiming at? What's your goal? What's your objective?
These are all synonyms. And by that I mean you're the overwhelming goal or objective. This is the thing that Viktor Frankl drives home, the Vienna psychologist. The overwhelming significance of motive. He broke with Jung and he broke with Freud.
He's got some good stuff, believe me, Viktor Frankl. It's commonplace with us, at least in words. But for many people it's a great discovery to find somebody saying that. That motivation is of the utmost importance. Aristotle said the final cause is the most important cause.
That's exactly the same thing. Thomas Aquinas hammers it home. So the thing you've got to first settle in your mind, on in your heart, and in your life, and have a gut conviction about is, what in the heck am I doing in this life? What's my purpose? What's the overwhelming, the over the overdrive of my whole life, which embraces everything else?
And there's gonna be a lot of everything else in there. But what is the great purpose? I just finished reading a story of Stengel, the great and notable if not notorious baseball fan. Where it was his absolute conviction that there were a lot of wonderful things in life, but nothing as wonderful as baseball. Well, I hope he went to heaven, and I hope he finds a fine diamond up there well equipped with what he needs.
I say that with a good bit of respect. But it's true. You we can get lost in these good things of life. We can get lost in our responsibilities of life. With our obligations, we can get lost in them.
We can lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is the only thing that gives meaning to the individual goals. And unless we have that, what that overwhelming meaning to life, what have we? And the answer is, in many instances, a psychiatrist's couch. And so, it's that overwhelming drive towards a perceived goal which we have embraced that gives meaning to my life. Now, if this is true, then there is nothing insignificant in my life.
Nothing. And the value of anything will be in proportion as it as it thrusts me towards that goal. And that's what you've got to measure it with. Not the applaud of the crowd. Not by the few ripples we make on a little old pond that we call our home turf.
Are we doing the work of the Lord? That's what it boils down to. What is the work of the Lord? Sometimes it's not too clear to know that. But in the last analysis, the work isn't so important.
As long as we put the seal of Jesus Christ on it, and we do that, we do that. Digging a ditch anybody can dig a ditch. It can be the work of a most reluctant, rebellious, bitter, cursing, blasphemous slave. It can be the triumph of a saint. Same job.
Doesn't change. Digging a ditch is digging a ditch. Maximilian Colby don't get tired of my referring to him. Remember, he was a lot more than the man who just gave up his life for a fellow prisoner. But one of the driving forces of his whole life was, don't try to reform the world.
Begin with yourself and your own immediate world. Because that's the only place you're ever going to have any influence, you know, that's going to amount anything. And there it can be tremendous. Which brings us back to Saint Teresa of Lucia. The young girl, she's dead at 24.
She's in the convent at 15. And she wanted to save souls in the missionary countries that knew not Christ. So she betakes herself into a contemplative cloistered order in Lisieux, Normandy, France. And I wager that her life don't actually prove this, but I'm willing to bet, and we'll settle this when we meet elsewhere, that her life has had more value and significance for the fire missions as she lived it in that cloister than it would have ever had had she gotten on some old boat and gone to the Holy Land. That I'm willing to abide by, and as I say, we won't be able to verify that till we all get together elsewhere.
In the name of the father, son, and holy spirit. Amen.