O Captain my Captain!

 Bettie shares the following reflection, written by Anthony Esolen, reprinted from Magnificat:
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from the poem The Soldier by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served
This soldiering through;
He of all can reeve a rope best.

Hopkins is thinking of the battle of the passion, when Jesus did not simply, passively, agree to die, but crushed in his unshakeable grip the throat of all-devouring Death and led from the grave the souls of the just. Christ’s is the rope that does not break. He reeves it through the rings and hoists the sail. He is our deliverance, who alone fights to the last… For Christ searches not for whose cuffs are in order, but whose knuckles are white with hard work, perhaps the work of praying the rosary as if all the words meant life and death in our storms of trouble, with the enemy near. Christ looks for his faithful soldiers, men and women, old and young; and, Hopkins says, he looks out for the man in uniform especially:

There he bides in bliss
Now, and seeing somewhere some man do
All that man can do,
For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
And cry ‘O Christ-done deed! So God-made flesh
Does too:
Were I come o’er again’, cries Christ, ‘it should be this.’

Have we done all that man can do? Suffered, as Mary, and not lost heart? May our Captain one day say of us, as to the fallen at Lepanto, “Had I come again in flesh, I would have done as you have done. For it was I who fought with you.”

Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College and a senior editor of Touchstone Magazine. He is the translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the author of Ironies of Faith.
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As we stand sentinel in front of 320, we must remember we are not fighting this fight ourselves. We are just foot soldiers in Christ’s army. He is our Captain. The battle has already been won, we know the outcome. We just need to be faithful and model Jesus. He will and does make all things new.

O, good Jesus, hear me, Within Your wounds hide me, that I may never be separated from You!