Hello, friends!
I am breaking with form and sending this newsletter today instead of Friday, since I’m currently back in the Midwest, spending time with my family.
As I mentioned last week, I’m doing something a little different with the newsletter until my friend who watches the littles on Monday and Wednesday mornings returns from her cross-country tour (If you’re reading this, Kate, you are missed! Desperately!!!). Q&A’s will return shortly, I promise.
This week, however, instead of writing something new, I am sharing a chapter from my book, Letters to Myself from the End of the World. For those who haven’t read it, the book is a series of letters on holiness, prayer, suffering, womanhood, injustice, and more, all written to my 25-year-old self. I wrote the book in 2020, as I watched our world turn upside down, but one letter in particular felt especially relevant this week. It’s about the Christian obligation to offer reparation for the sins of the world.
I have very strong feelings about the barbaric massacre which took place in Israel this past week. I also have fairly well-formed thoughts about the ongoing conflict between Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian people. I will share what I think are solid resources on the geopolitical reality below. But this week was not the week for me to write an essay sharing those thoughts. For now, this older essay seemed like the single most helpful thing I could share.
PLEASE NOTE: There is a lot the letter doesn’t say. It was written three years ago in regards to conflicts within the Unites States, not the Middle East. It doesn’t even remotely deal with the tenets of just war, the rights of nations to defend themselves, the slaughter of innocents, millennia-old cycles of violence, colonization or decolonization, the horrific evil of anti-Semitism, the importance of self-determination, and a dozen other charged topics which are endemically relevant to what is happening today, on the ground in Israel and Gaza.
But it does offer one concrete action that every Christian can and should be taking right now to help heal this broken world.
And with that, here is this week’s essay, provided free to all the Internet, because of the kind support of those full subscribers. If you want to become one, it’s as easy as clicking a button.
“Offer Reparation.” June 26, 2020 Hawthorne House
Dear Emily,
We’re packing this morning and getting ready to hit the road for Wisconsin. I don’t want to leave for vacation, though, without adding one more thought on responding to injustice.
The brokenness of this earth goes so deep, and the process of its healing is a mystery to me. I know the ultimate answer is Jesus. Jesus came. Jesus died. Jesus rose again. In doing so, He opened the floodgates for God’s sanctifying grace to pour into this world once more. I also know one day Jesus will come again and make all things new—a new heaven and a new earth.
But how He does that, how it’s possible, how that work of recreating, redeeming, and sanctifying is going on even now as the whole planet seems to be falling apart . . . I got nothing. Or, not much.
What I do know is that Jesus doesn’t want to work alone. Even though the graces He won for the world on the cross were superabundant—more than enough to secure our salvation—He still wants all of us who live in Him to work with Him in the redemption of the world. Saint Paul was quite explicit about this: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church” (Col 1:24).
God, for reasons all His own, invites us into the work of redemption. He wants us to be a part of everything Jesus did. So, He asks us to lavish love, mercy, and compassion on each other. He asks us to help heal one another. He asks us to pray for one another. He asks us to serve one another. And He asks us to atone for sin—to make spiritual reparation to God for both our sins and the sins of others.
It’s that last one—the work of reparation—that catches most people off guard. Yes, we know we’re supposed to love one another, serve one another, and forgive one another. But make reparation for one another’s sins? How is that possible? After all, isn’t that why Jesus had to become man in the first place? Because we weren’t capable of atoning for sin on our own?
It’s true that if we’re operating on our own, with no help from God, we can atone for nothing—not our sins, not others’ sins. God has given us so much—including Himself—and every No we utter to Him is a tragedy of cosmic proportions. When it comes to sin, He is always the victim. “Why do the majority of men treat the adorable Savior as if He were their worst enemy?” the seventeenth-century priest Saint John Eudes once asked. “How can they be so cruel as to crucify Him every day! Yes, crucify Him; for whoever commits a mortal sin ‘crucifies again to himself the Son of God.’”[i]
There’s no way any of us can make up for that. Not on our own. But as baptized Christians in a state of grace, we’re not on our own. God’s life dwells within us. That life makes our prayers, sacrifices, and penances powerful. It makes them efficacious. It unites them to Christ’s own atoning sacrifice on Calvary and helps repair the damage inflicted on the world—on the temporal order—by sin.
It’s important not to confuse forgiveness and reparation. Forgiveness is what we extend to others when they hurt us. It’s a gesture of mercy from the person who has suffered. Reparation, on the other hand, is a gesture of atonement from the person who has inflicted the suffering. It’s helping repair what we’ve broken through our wrong actions.
Think, for example, of boys playing baseball. If one boy throws a ball through a window, the person whose window he broke might forgive him, but the window is still broken. It still needs repairing. The boy can atone for his actions by offering to pay for a new window.
It works the same with relationships. If Chris says something hurtful to me, he can say he’s sorry, and I’ll forgive him. But the distance he created between us with his hurtful words is still there. Him bringing me flowers or saying something extra kind can help close that distance.
When Jesus died on Calvary, His death atoned for all the wrong men and women ever had done or ever will do. It bridged the gulf created by sin between man and God. But again, because God wants us to partner with Jesus in the redemption of the world, He left room for us to make amends and help repair the damage done in the world by sin.
And so much damage needs repairing.
In America alone, there is massive damage from ongoing sin—damage from the unparalleled horror of the sixty-two million lives lost to abortion since 1973, plus damage from racism, damage from greed, damage from the myriad violations of God’s plan for love and marriage (from contraception and premarital sex to pornography, misogyny, human trafficking, and more), plus damage from unjust labor practices, slander, gossip, selfishness, and a billion other sins committed daily.
There is also old damage from old sins that have weakened this country at its foundations. America may have ended slavery a century-and-a-half ago, but the wounds of that horrifying injustice have not closed and have not healed. The same goes for the wounds left by lynching, race riots, Jim Crowe laws, institutionalized segregation and discrimination, redlining, and the countless acts of racism committed by individual men and women through the centuries.
As for the Church, we have our own gaping, unhealed wounds from clerical abuse, ecclesial cowardice and coverups, pink palaces, rampant heresy, callous indifference, and petty cruelty.
It’s easy to sit around and be angry at others for committing those sins. It’s easy to point fingers and say, “Look at those terrible people who do those terrible things.” It’s also easy to tell ourselves that many of those sins were committed long ago, by people we didn’t know, and so we bear no responsibility for them, that they have nothing to do with us.
But they have everything to do with us. Every last sin. As human beings, we are one family. We are one people. We fell as a people. We were redeemed as a people. We are our brothers’ keepers. By the power of Christ and through the merits of Christ, God invites us to help set the world right. We need to take Him up on that invitation. We need to let go of our anger, overcome our indifference, and offer spiritual reparation to God for our sins and the sins of others.
Offer reparation, Emily. You choose: a daily Rosary, a first Saturday Mass, a Friday fast, a prayer to the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart, your middle-of-the-night feedings with a baby, your pain in all the years you’ll wait for that baby. Just pick some prayer, penance, or pain you can offer for the sins of your brothers and sisters today and for the sins of your brothers and sisters yesterday.
Offer reparation for the slave traders and slaveholders. For the abortionists. For the pornographers and KKK members. For the pedophile priests and cowardly bishops. For the robber barons and drug lords. For the liars, the cheaters, the slanderers, the adulterers, the anti-Semites, the murderers. For the people who stood silently by, through it all, doing nothing to stop the injustice being done before their eyes.
We can’t build a more just society when the wounds of injustice are still open and bleeding. There has to be spiritual reparation. And if Christians don’t offer it, who will?
You want to do something about the injustice you see all around you? This is it. Start here. If you don’t, if we don’t, it doesn’t matter whom you vote for or what you march for or what you post on social media. Without reparation, there can be no healing. And without healing, there can be no justice.
Blessings, Emily
Five Things I’m Loving
For those looking to understand the roots of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, I highly recommend this interview Coleman Hughes did with Dr. Benny Morris. It is extensive and far-reaching, going all the way back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement in the 1880s. I shared it earlier this week on Instagram and am sharing it again here because it’s that good.
I’ve listened to about a dozen podcasts other podcasts since Sunday focused on Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian people. I most appreciated The Fifth Column’s Sunday Live with Eli Lake and Congressman Peter Meijer. It’s for subscribers only (which I am), so if you are already a listener to the podcast, it’s worth upping your subscription to hear. If you’re not a listener already, just be forewarned that while this one was perfectly tame, they are not always edifying and I probably disagree with them 50 percent of the time. On Sunday, 24 hours after the attacks, Bari Weiss did a very helpful interview with Former Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren that touched on a number of important points. And this story in the Atlantic, about one family’s encounter in their home, with the the terrorists, while definitely political, has been haunting me since I read it. .
On a different note, for important insights into the ongoing conundrum of Pope Francis, the dubia submitted to him by a group of cardinals, and the pope’s response, give a listen to last week’s Pillar podcast. JD and Ed do a fantastic job of talking about really hard things with charity and nuance, and I am, as always, grateful for their work.
Beautycounter extended its offer of free shipping on any two holiday sets through this Saturday, October 14. I can’t say enough about how good the Clean Eau De Parfum Duo is (or how affordable they’ve made it). And my number one top pick for someone needing a simple, effective winter skin care routine is the Plump and Polish Trio. Use the code CLEANFORALL20 to save 20 percent on your first order.
We are using the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for Toby right now (and indirectly Becket). I have been sooooo happy with how simple, easy, and affective it has been. We still have a long way to go, but I am already seeing results and am so happy my friend Jenni (who teaches Kindergarten at our hybrid school) recommended this to me, so I figured I should pass the recommendation along.
P.S. We are 33 days from launching my next children’s book with Scott Hahn, The Supper of the Lamb, and if you want a copy in your hands ASAP, you can pre-order now.
In Case You Missed It
The Devil and All His Works: On Demons, Deliverance, and Celebrity Exorcists (Full Subscribers Only)
Things That Make Me Cry: Two Dancing Feet (Free for all Subscribers)
The Marital Debt, Mary, and the Feminine Genius (Free for all Subscribers)
[i] Saint John Eudes, Le Cœur admirable, quoted in Raoul Plus, S.J., “Reparation to the Sacred Heart,” Catholic Tradition, accessed February 24, 2021, http://www.catholictradition.org/Two-Hearts/reparation1b.htm.