This Is a Love Story

For those looking for hope in the heat of the election, here is a powerful sermon by a young Dominican training for the priesthood, Br. Jerome Zeiler, preached at a vigil for All Saints Day. Here are a few highlights:

We are surrounded by darkness, the darkness of atheistic nihilism and the culture of death, which proclaims that we came from nothing, and that we are going back to nothing, and that human life is ultimately meaningless, marriage is meaningless, everything is meaningless—and that the best we can do is seek some small pleasure or distraction in the passing trifles of this meaningless world, but, thanks be to God, this darkness has not overcome the light which shines without our souls . . . .

Now, as we all know, being a saint is not easy. Our battle is not against flesh and blood. No saint ever won the crown without a bloody fight.

And although Christ may not ask of us physical martyrdom, as He did of St. Dominic Ibanez, we well know that He will one day also ask of us complete self-sacrifice. But as we also read again, and again, and again in the lives of the saints, nothing, nothing at all gave them more ecstatic joy than being reviled, and persecuted, and suffering in every way for the love of Jesus Christ.

Why? Because it makes for a better love story. In fact, in a mysterious way, it makes for the perfect love story. It makes for the perfect manifestation of love, which is something love strongly desires . . . .

Brothers and sisters, what can separate us from the love of Christ? If God is for us, who can be against us? And what can prevent this story from being the story of our life—one which we, like little children when it is time to rest, will never tire of having read to us again, and again, and again as we live happily ever after with Jesus Christ our Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, our mother, and all the saints in our true home for all eternity?”