“Vigils, sleep, agony, death–God shares all of these states of the human condition with us because He was also a man, but a man present everywhere because He was God. He is present first of all in the Church; he is present by His grace within us as He is present in the Sacrament on the Altar; He is present wherever two more three are gathered together in His name as He is present in each one of our brothers. There is no encounter in which we do not encounter Him; no solitude in which He does not join us; no silence where His voice is not heard deepening, rather than troubling, our silence.
What a grace! But a grace we do not have the right to keep for ourselves. Let us not be like Nicodemus who conversed with the Lord only in the secret of the night. Our hidden life with Christ ought to have some bearing on our lives as citizens. We cannot approve or practice publicly in the name of Caesar what the Lord condemns, disapproves, or curses–whether it be failure to honor our word, exploitation of the poor, police torture, or regimes of terror. If, according to the promise made to us on the Mount, we had been meek, we would have possessed the land.”
