Body and blood of Christ

iStock/nambitomo

I don’t usually put stock in news analysts, but I’ll be honest, I was hoping for the promised “red wave” of the midterm elections. I was convinced propositions to codify abortion would be struck down in Michigan and Kentucky, for example. In my own state, I watched intelligent, worthy candidates work tirelessly to run robust campaigns I was sure would speak to the hearts and minds of my fellow Minnesotans.

As the evening wore on and my candidates struggled to stay in the race, my heart sank. When we awoke to more bad news, I spent the day in a defeated funk. As the votes were tallied throughout the week, it was like death by a million paper cuts — my favored pro-life, pro-Catholic social thought candidates losing by the tiniest margins.

I wondered what I might have done differently. Obviously, it’s not enough to put out a yard sign or write a check. Where might I have had more influence? Did I make too many assumptions about how involved and invested my neighbors are in the direction of this country and the role of religion in determining that direction?

It’s become a popular notion — with good reason — that we no longer live in a Christian era but have returned to an apostolic age; and therefore, we must return to the same methods used in an apostolic age to bring others to conversion. Of course, a predominant outcome of those methods was martyrdom. So maybe the question I need ask is: Am I willing to go as far as the first Apostles to defend the faith? Am I willing to allow my life to shrink in comfort and ease to live for the truth of Christ?

My friends, let’s never forget whom we serve! There is no “balance of power” in heaven. God is God, and he reigns in majesty and splendor, without worry or fear or uncertainty. He cares mightily for his creation and sends his Holy Spirit before us always. It can be no coincidence that Church leadership has been stirred with the need for a prolonged Eucharistic Revival at this time. How much the early Church must have needed the fervor Jesus brought to them in the Eucharist. How much we need that same fire and fervor to face our culture.

No matter your political bent, we can all agree that our world is in desperate need of apostles on this point — to reach neighbors and friends and family with the truth of Jesus present in the Blessed Sacrament, to remember what has been accomplished through his blood shed on the Cross, to remember that the Incarnation has left the world radically new.

The battle imagery of St. Paul is as fitting now as it was when he first used it. “Take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day,” he writes. How we need the “belt of truth. . . the breastplate of righteousness. . . the shield of faith . . . to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Eph 6:10-17).

The “red wave” we really need is not on an election map; he is in the sanctuary, the precious body and blood of Christ longing to renew our fervor, to give us fresh ideas about how to reach the lost, the confused and the openly adversarial.

Lord, I forgot you for a moment. Forgive me. I beg you for a fresh anointing from the Holy Spirit, a renewed armor ready and able to quench the flaming arrows of evil, error and ignorance.

Kelly Stanchina is the award-winning author of eleven books, including “Love Like A Saint: Cultivating Virtue with Holy Women” and “A Place Called Golgotha: Meditations on the Last Words of Christ” (January 2023). Visit her website at LizK.org.