"Upon This Rock" By:C.C.

"You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it." (Matthew 16:18)

Even while I lived in complete error, even while I accepted sin religiously, I never thought anything within the Catholic Church was untrue.

It lingered truthful and intact, just unexplored, and unloved.

I dismissed it , accepting that it would be waiting , just as it has been left to us by Him. Waiting as constant and fixed as Christ left it to us, but I preferred the fluidity of the world , and all of its apparent freedoms.

I remember meeting a few religious, those people imbued with a sense of the Gospel , those to whom God was really God and they were subject to His authority.

I thought myself free. Not beyond His authority, but more tragically beyond His love.

In fact, I completely chose myself there. To love other things and left no room to love Him adequately, nor the room for Him to take the place He most deserved and desired, denying Him the place He created. 

But He rang the bell of my heart , He sang there in times of need. He reminded me Whose I was, always seeking to gain entry to a place He owned yet was shut out of completely.

Eventually He won , His Rock demolishing the castles I'd built from the sand of sin.

What is this Truth we possess , if it does not leave us changed? What is this faith we profess if our whole life is not rearranged?

On the feast of the Saintly lover in 2014 , on a fresh day in February, I knelt before the bones of St.Peter , and I felt mine within shatter in further surrender. I believed before I got there, but I left that tomb faithful in spaces within me I didn't know existed.

And so I do not worry what may force against It. I do not mind those entrenched in error and sin, for Truth, though unlived remains intact and valid. God's promise to us is a constant comfort.

He alone can ring the bell.

He alone will call His children home to Rome.