"Your Tripod" reflects the personal Fourth Day journeys of its authors and editors. We are happy to have companions like you share in this project. Our prayer is that these reflections will invite and inspire your Fourth Day journey of Piety, Study and Action as much as writing or editing them inspires our journey and brings us all close moments with Jesus and our neighbors.
But the wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament, and those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.Daniel 12:3
Every priest stands daily at his ministry, offering frequently those same sacrifices that can never take away sins.But this one offered one sacrifice for sins, and took his seat forever at the right hand of God; now he waits until his enemies are made his footstool.For by one offering he has made perfect forever those who are being consecrated.Hebrews 10:11-14
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.Mark 13:31-32
Piety
The Last Sundays before Advent remind us that we are not going to live forever. We are all going to die. Whether the end comes with a big Bang as we all are all made suddenly aware of our mortality or we have the privilege of preparing ourselves over a period of time remains to be seen. Whether it would be a privilege to live to the final consummation of the world remains to be seen. At the least we will all die when our allotted time is over. Meditation on our death bed can bring an honesty that we never had previously. When we see Christ coming in all his glory with the angels and the saints, we will be saddened by all the ways we held back in saying out “Yes” to Christ. It will be all too obvious what we should have done in our big decisions of life. We can now try to reach that honesty by pretending we are now on our death bed.Doing so offers the chance to be really honest with ourselves in taking stock of how we are facing life and where the room for real improvement lays. Our piety is the quality of the Christ life we live in the here and now and how alike to Christ we are.
Study
God has a destiny for each of us. How we conform to the plan of God is important to our happiness. How we put value on what we do and how we come to awareness of what needs to be changed in our life flows out of real self honesty.Piety challenges us to live our lives with the highest possible conformity to what Jesus would do if he had been us. The paradox of life is that baptism gives us God’s love for Christ. It gives us a new birth with the destiny of eternal life with God in Christ. Christ is the ticket to happiness. He will be coming for us. The best study in our lives is always going to be the study of ourselves in seeing how we conform to Christ’s way of doing things. Christ gives us his presence in our lives.His birth as the baby of Bethlehem changes everything. Our study of his presence in our lives is called the examen of the consciousness of Christ. How one we are with him comes from how we live our lives in his presence. Paul’s claim of “now I do not live, but Christ lives in me” is the result of dying to ourselves for the sake of rising with Christ. Our study tells us when we are off the beaten track of the saints who followed Christ closely. We study Christ and our saints to learn better how to be Christ for one another. Our hearts are forever urging us to be true to ourselves in Christ. There is no bypass of the Cross of Christ. We live and die with Christ as the ultimate meaning of our lives. Our study allows us to be conscious of what we can do for Christ. Our closeness to Christ will give us confidence when the Day of Judgment comes.
Action
When Christ arrives in all his glory there will be honesty in all of us that the world will respond to with pleasure in those who served Christ by what they did for the poor and the needy of their lives. Those who served the Cross of Christ by their redemptive suffering for others will have our admiration and find recompense and their fame in heaven because of their share of the redemptive suffering of Christ.The splinters of the cross of Christ that are ours will be our claim to fame in heaven.We will see our own lives in the light of Christ. How we will wish we made all our decisions in the light of the glory of Christ. What good we hesitated in doing will be our only regrets in heaven. Serving the cross of Christ will seem so obvious a thing to have done. Those who are free enough in their lives to anticipate the Final Judgment are to be envied. We can learn to distinguish where and when selfishness is driving us and we can find the motivation to be selfless in how we serve each other. All the actions of our lives that put others before ourselves will pay off in ways we could never have dreamt of because heaven will be so much more than our fondest dreams. We will live forever in the Christ of our hearts.
