I’m pretty good about rolling with the punches, and I’ve had my share of mistakes at work. But this was different. Worse.

After landing in LaGuardia, I checked my email messages as we prepared to de-board the plane. A note from a good friend inquired, “How was that conference you spoke at today?”

Huh?

“No, the conference is tomorrow.” I typed back. “I’ve just landed in New York.”

My friend responded back right away. “Um, you might want to check the brochure, because I think it was today.”

Radio silence.

Beads of sweat started rolling down my forehead as I headed to baggage claim, rummaging through my briefcase for the conference material—the same conference that was advertising Yours Truly as a key speaker. I finally found it and stopped short, looking at the date in disbelief. “No. No! NO! This can’t be right!” My heart dropped into my shoes. I had missed the conference by a day.

I wanted to crawl out of my skin right there in the middle of baggage claim. But I couldn’t. So I let out the kind of scream that no one sees—the kind that turns your stomach, rips your insides around, and then ties a double knot so you can’t breathe.

Mortified, I remembered that some of the top lawyers in my field were among both the panelists and guests. People were paying to hear me speak. But it was too late now, and there was nothing I could do about it.

My first reaction was to find someone else to blame.

I’m sorry, but you must have sent me the wrong date.

Don’t you people send out reminders? It’s not my fault.

My secretary booked the wrong flight.

I even thought about telling a teeny tiny lie—you know, the kind that is partially true.

I came down with an unexpected illness. (No kidding, I was feeling really sick.)

I had an emergency come up. (It’s called a brain lapse.)

I got stuck in traffic. (Just on the wrong day.)

But all I could do was say, “I’m sorry,” so I picked up my phone and made the dreaded call. No excuses. No lies.

I quickly reached the conference organizer and apologized. As it turned out, she was genuinely worried about my safety and said she understood the mix-up. She even promised to include me in next year’s program. I knew I would have to make further amends—like apologies to the conference panelists, something I wasn’t looking forward to. But I’d have to deal with that later.

I had blown it, and I desperately needed God’s grace once again. As much as I try, I just can’t keep it all together on my own strength. Grace wipes my tears and reminds me of my humanity. Grace is the hard floor that catches me when my knees give in. It’s the net that holds me, keeping me from falling into the endless abyss.

I sat down in LaGuardia airport and cried.

In this age of relativism, anyone who presents a firm moral stance on an issue will often be asked, “Who are you to say what’s right and wrong?”

And really, I have to admit, they have a point. Not that there is no objective right and wrong, but that I have absolutely no authority to say what is right and what is wrong. I am not an authority. I am not authorized by another authority to make decrees about the rightness or wrongness of a darn thing. I am not empowered to decide for myself what is right and what is wrong.

And, of course, neither are they.

Humans do not decide such worlds-breaking things as rightness and wrongness, or human nature, or the existence of God. It’s not up to us. We don’t get to choose whether we live in a world with or without a God—we are only permitted to choose what we acknowledge, what we profess. We don’t get to decide if we live in a world where stealing is permissible or forbidden—we are only permitted to decide if we will abide by the laws in existence. We are in the presence of something entirely outside our control. And it drives us crazy.

Modernity, after all, is almost entirely predicated around the idea that progress is an expansion of individual choice and autonomy at the expense of whatever stands in our way. Man must conquer nature, must destroy distance, overcome the boundaries of gravity and time, must fend off death by any means necessary, must defeat the enemies of freedom by any means necessary. Our slogan, in fact, has become “By Any Means Necessary,” which is, of course, the sort of slogan that motivated the forces of Hell when they fought in the first great revolution against the Man—that is, the Triune God and his angels.

So we resist any imposition by any other upon our own, freely choosing (that is, autonomous) will when it comes to morality. We must be permitted the freedom to be mature, to make our own choices, to be respected for our maturity and the work we put into making our own choices. At the same time, as Pope Benedict has made abundantly clear, when truth is no longer the criterion for discerning the good, all that we are left with is power and politics. When good or evil do not rest in objective norms, then whoever is the most powerful decides what can and cannot be done. Freedom disappears in the name of freedom from objective norms. We are reduced to slavery beneath the boot of the tyrant and his majority, beneath the unfettered whim of his disordered will.

And, as Benedict, Blessed John Paul II, and C. S. Lewis often reiterated, true freedom comes from conforming ourselves and our world to the truth, to objective norms of right and wrong. Humans are liberated by behaving correctly according to their nature. Of course, at the heart of salvation history is one enormous exception to this rule—we are liberated by saying, “Yes” to the divine marriage proposal and accepting transcendence. We are made free in the Spirit by being adopted as sons and daughters of God—by grace, not by nature. But this is not to discard achieving freedom through obedience to nature. We are made partakers in the divine nature, as St. Peter tells us, and so the morality binding on Christians is the morality fitting to the divine life and love of God. Christian morality is the morality of the cross, of the total self gift made manifest in Christ’s passion and death which lies at the heart of the Trinity. The cross makes transparent the innermost life of God, and has been described by the popes as the deepest, most clear revelation of God which humanity has ever been privileged to witness.

Christ on the cross is a word to us, announcing the objective norm to which humans are called. We are made in God’s image and likeness, a phrase which indicates sonship. Adam and Eve are made in God’s image and likeness, and at the start of Genesis 5, have a son, Seth, who is in Adam’s image and likeness. Luke calls Adam “son of God” in his recounting of Jesus’s genealogy. The whole human race was created to be sons and daughters of God by grace, but Adam and Eve plundered the estate of their Father and became the first prodigal children. Christ on the cross is the sign of the Father come running with outstretched arms to embrace his children, his brethren, and draw them home.

We are not empowered to decide morality, only to discern it, and in it, the love of God, Father, Son, and Spirit.

Thank God for the mediocre priests. 

Praise Him for the lukewarm and wishy-washy Church leaders.

Bless Him for the days of half-hearted adherence to Church teaching and the post-conciliar years of the infallible self.

And I mean that from the bottom of my Church/Tradition/Magesterium respecting heart, because God in his Mercy has used these men to bring salvation to souls.

I was speaking with a convert friend recently, listening to her account of coming to the faith.  She was preparing to marry a fallen-away Catholic whose roots were tugging him back for the celebration of the Sacrament of Matrimony.  A heathen whose taste for things spiritual was rapidly becoming a fully-fledged hunger, she was willing to be married in the Church building.

“Whatever,” she thought.

To her, it was the emotion, not the place, that mattered.  A painless concession to old-school in-laws.

But would the priest allow it?

A Big Tent man, he welcomed the couple with outstretched arms.  “Come on!  Of course you can be married here!”  He intoned boisterously.

She didn’t even have to sign the paper saying she’d raise the kids Catholic.  The one my pen almost choked on when it was my turn, a rabid Protestant, to marry a Catholic. 

In she came, and the Sacrament, the outward sign of the invisible grace, became a platform, a foundation, a core for more, and the ultimate result of grace building upon grace, established on the nature of her willingness, propped up by the somewhat lackadaisical approach of the parish priest, is the reason she was eventually baptized along with their children. 

It’s why she is today a Church/Tradition/Magisterium respecting Catholic.

There was another priest in the 1970s – I don’t even know his name.  He must have had a blase attitude toward the stricter norms regarding education required for baptism, and the pesky little godparents detail, because he baptized a whole family – mom, dad, two small children – without so much as a crash course in making the sign of the cross, although perhaps there was a handout on the creation of felt banners.

And clearly, the ancient Church has her reasons for requiring the anchors of education and godparently assistance for the neophyte, because very soon thereafter, the family fell away.  And the baptisms were forgotten.

But the grace of the Sacrament was at work.

Like Tolkien’s Ring of Power, the grace built quietly with the passing of years until one day, the fullness of time came, and the grace ignited a homing beacon.  There followed a strange and unlikely sequence of events that did not involve hobbits, but resulted in one of the children, now Protestant marrying a Catholic, in the Catholic Church.  One Sacrament having attracted another in a hungry soul, the combined grace power of the two was more than the soul could resist.  Twenty-one years after the somewhat improperly imbued grace of Baptism, the soul came home to live in the Catholic Church, receiving the Easter ‘Grand Slam’ of Reconciliation, Communion, and Confirmation’ in very short order.

Then came the phone call to family.

“Oh, and by the way, I became Catholic.”

A long silence, during which the years of Protestantism marched in reverse review until the long-forgotten day of the unlikely baptism was projected on the screen of family memory.

“Well!”  the voice was indignant toward the traitor.  “Well!  I suppose I’m not too surprised since you were baptized Catholic when you were two!”

She nearly dropped the phone.

And then she laughed.

For what God but ours would create time-release grace?

Who, but our God would know how to bring good from the work of those who should perhaps know better than to pass out Sacraments with such a cavalier attitude?

And how could it be contrived, except through His omnipotent omniscience that an invisible, indelible homing device could be affixed to a soul so that despite distance and intervening years, in spite of hours of fishing at the “new religion” pond, a soul could be recalled?

“This one’s mine,” God said.  “See my mark?

And I praise Him for the unknown, and perhaps unorthodox priest who put that mark on me.  Who, more fastidious, might have insisted on proper form, a lengthly process for which my drifting parents would not have waited and my friend might not have bothered.    Our souls would have been left nameless, master-less, vulnerable, without the the latent attraction to the Faith that eventually drew us home.

God bless the lukewarm priests, and the soul-saving power of Christ which can work through them.