A word in haste:
My name is Paul Chu. I’m a writer and academic, and I’ve been doing some editing recently for Where Peter Is.
This morning, I heard for the first time that our Holy Father Pope Francis called for a day of fasting and prayer for peace today – the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza.
This morning, I taught two classes at a Catholic college; the young students in my charge were clearly unaware of the Pope’s call, and seemed but little aware of the geopolitical situation in any respect. Though I find this saddening, I cannot completely fault them. In a world of hot takes and amateur punditry, any viewpoint they did manage to garner would likely be an oversimplification. Prayer and sacrifice can hardly be expected to show up on the radar, in such a world.
I would hazard that quite a few of you are seeing this for the first time now. I suspect that you would have heard far more – and not only from the secular press – if the pope had said something that could be spun as controversial, as red meat for the ideologues of left and right, within the Church or without. I hope you can spare a moment for a quick prayer, or perhaps make some small food sacrifice.
In a few minutes, I will be teaching my third class of the day to a group of community college students. I doubt that all of them even know who Pope Francis is, but they know quite a bit about prayer and sacrifice – even if the prayers are often desperate and the sacrifices not always voluntary.
This is part of what we will be reading together:
Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.
These words, taken from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, invariably resonate with the group, no matter their various beliefs. That Frankl, a Jew and a survivor of Auschwitz, could speak so fluently and authoritatively of the cross is a salutary challenge to us all. Let us pray today for the Holy Land and all its people – Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Let us pray today, especially, for peace.
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
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