I hear you. Sometimes being Christ in those insanely difficult ego-battle situations only means using all your strength to politely say “I don’t want to discuss this anymore” and walking away instead of ripping their arm off to stuff it down their throat.

There is a story from the desert fathers where they’re asking the oldest one in their midst about miracles and the future. They asked, “What kind of miracles will those do who come after us?” and then “What about the ones after that?” and so on. Each time the wise elder replied, “They will do even less.”

Finally they asked about those at the end of the age. He said, “They won’t do any miracles and yet they will be greater than all the rest of us.” From this I take it that all our strength will be required simply to retain our own salvation, let alone strive to turn the tide in someone else’s life.

I guess we could add here the well-worn adage: “Acquire inner peace and the thousands around you will find their salvation.”

This can be so much harder in some ways when those to whom you are trying to be a true example of faith think of themselves as genuine and good Christians and think that all their ego bluster is defending the cause of “right” and of Christ. I’m still reeling after a relative who was visiting recently came into my house listening to a podcast of Rush Limbaugh on his IPod. I asked him to please turn it off and when he found out how I felt about Rush’s m.o., it was one of those notorious collisions of two massively inflated egos that you wish would never happen. I was so upset by his arrogant certainty I was just brainwashed by the Liberal media portrayal, and that I wouldn’t feel the way I did if I would just listen to Rush for a couple of weeks, that I literally had trouble breathing to talk.

Several members of the family are into this type of inflammatory rhetoric around these cultural political issues (Ann Coulter is another “darling” of that set), and family gatherings have occasionally erupted because we also have an Obama supporter and a State level Planned Parenthood board member (same person) in the family! These occasional eruptions fueled by the culture wars are classic examples of the complete and utter “lack of presence” in the “conversations” of so many in our culture and parishes. My husband and I are in the middle of this tinder box doing our best to drop the dew of the the grace and truth of Christ where we can. We love our family, but sometimes it is really overwhelming because it is almost impossible to find the real person underneath the endlessly needy egos.

1. Reading the Bible; 2. A friendship with a dedicated Christian who neither attempted to explain away the Bible or other Christian truths, yet treated them with love, respect and kindness; 3. What the author described as ‘supernatural’ dreams and visions.

I wonder how and it what way such incidents apply to us as we attempt to ‘evangelize the neurotic’(everybody).

I’ve been thinking lately about that a lot. My wife’s family is, at best, lukewarm to Christianity and highly secularized, quite intelligent and due to the circumstances of my marriage and my own clumsiness somewhat closed to me as well. So, it seems, I must take the tact that is the least comfortable and hardest for me to do: engage them in love and friendship with no ulterior motive.