Kelly Kidwell retweeted
Y'know why parish life is dominated by 60-80-year-olds? Because anyone not retired has Shit To Do. They are raising kids, keeping their marriages together, surviving endless downsizing, paying bills, and so on.
St. Therese the Little Flower says, "Don't seek to do great things. Seek to do small things with great love".
Your alternative is to be an obsessive prepper storing ammo and Clif bars away, waiting for the Pope to declare the next Crusade against global Islam. Not gonna happen.
Y'know who gets the girl? The guy with the stable job and the mortgage in the suburbs. The guy who donates blood and, yeah, flips pancakes at the Knights of Columbus breakfast. Maybe he signs up to teach CCD or, God forbid, takes a Holy Hour at 3:00 am on a Thursday and then goes to work the next day with a happy attitude.
These are the heroic sacrifices we are offered because these are the sacrifices that our world needs.
Look, my imagination is also fired up by heroic deeds of derring-do. I also have Ken Brannagh's St. Crispian's Day speech from Henry V on loop in the back of my skull. I, too, want to buy acreage in the middle of nowhere and build An Actual Castle and dare someone to try laying siege to it.
But what's good for my family is to have the too-small ranch house that's within walking distance to the parish school. To work long hours to pay my kids' tuition to that school. Maybe give a little extra to Father for the family that can't quite afford it. And then to not let anyone know.
Because it's not about that young man and never was. And growth in the spiritual life, especially for a young Catholic man, is accepting that swords & sorcery are wonderful and important myths from which we learn much enduring Truth. And then to accept the setting the child's play aside and apply that Truth to what's in front of us...what's necessary. The young man wants adventure and glorious stories to tell and true brothers by his side to share them with. Of course he does.
It is entirely natural for young men to want glory and honor and a mighty steed and a tall ship and a sharp sword with a fantastic name and worthy enemies to vanquish. That's why those stories persist. It's good for us as men to read them, to let them soak into our bones, to thoroughly absorb their lessons.
Christ calls us, however, to transmute those desires into higher, purer versions of themselves. He calls us not to accrue glory and honor but to give glory and honor to God. To put aside childish things. To give in secret. To pray in secret. To humbly consider others' needs higher than our own. To drag ourselves, slowly and slowly, with the aid of much grace, out of the entirely natural and into the supernatural. Everyone wants to do great deeds, for God or otherwise. But sanctity is built in the little things.
Have more kids than you can afford.
Work like the dickens to raise them in the Faith.
Burn your boyish dreams on the altar of what God actually asks of you in the here and now.
Now you're the hero you hoped you would be when you were 16. Or 26.