Ferguson Sounds Alarms on the Conscience

Last updated on: November 25, 2014 at 9:25 am by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Ferguson Sounds Alarms on the Conscience 2014-11-25T09:25:04-05:00 Kathryn Jean Lopez

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Have that awful feeling that comes from a nation seeming to be gawking at evil this morning?

It was a bit like tuning into CSI Ferguson last night, as I commented on National Review Online.

Archbishop Richard Carlson’s plea for peace to the people in Ferguson — and those who have gathered there — is a ping to the conscience of us all, on many fronts.

It reminded me of a moment few months ago, Cardinal Donald Weurl in Washington sounding an urgent alarm about the Christians who are being eliminated in Iraq and Syria.

We sometimes tend to have one of two predominant reactions to evil. (a) Looking away, as we do in the case of Iraq and Syria or (b) watching, as if another crime drama series.

Media has the blessed opportunity to highlight good and expose injustice and true evil to the sun. But it can also add to the problem. Adding to the problem –fanning flames — certainly is a cause for concern here. As media has sometimes become a sidestory and winds up providing a platform for those who might take advantage of a man’s death and subsequent grief.

The point of this post is simply this: Christians: pray! Are we praying? Will we go to Mass Thanksgiving morning? That’s what it’s really about. That’s what we’re here for.

Praying for peace in #ferguson at Blessed Teresa of Calcutta with Father Rosey & Archbishop Carlson #catholicstl pic.twitter.com/GFi6qAsYzB

— lisa johnston (@aeternusphoto) November 25, 2014

Last night I was reading from The Practice of the Presence of God from Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. He had come to realize that “our only business … is to love God.” If pious practices or disciplines — do not come from this reality, this motivation, this thanksgiving, they may “prove quite useless,” he reflects.

He wrote that:

We need only recognize God intimately present with us, and address Him every moment.

And that:

In our continual conversation with God we really praise, adore, and love Him incessantly because of His infinite goodness and perfection?

And, provides this potentially transformative guidance:

Our sanctification does not depend on changing the way we do things, but doing for God what we normally do for ourselves.

I suppose Brother Lawrence, who lived in a Carmelite monastery in 17th century France, is a long way from Ferguson. And yet, he reminds us to get about our business …

As, toward that, he also emphasizes:

Time presses us and we have no room for delay: our souls are at stake.

And the souls of every life entrusted to us — at our Thanksgiving dinner table and in Ferguson, Missouri, or
living in a tent in a church in Erbil.

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