Pray with the Pope: We Must Not Walk Alone

Intention: Let us pray that broken families might discover the cure for their wounds through forgiveness, rediscovering each other’s gifts, even in their differences.

I  vote the Marlboro Man, the cowboy on those old cigarette ads, as the greatest uncondemned heresy of our time — the myth, the terrible falsehood in fact, of the tough guy who needs no one, the sovereign individual who heads off into the sunset in splendid, self-sufficient aloneness.

He can sleep anywhere, live off the land and defend himself all alone — well, until there is a blizzard, or he gets bitten by a snake, or falls off his horse and breaks a leg!

The later, personal stories of the real, flesh and blood Marlboro men make for sad reading. One poignant irony was that at least four of these men who affected the rugged cowboy image to sell cigarettes later succumbed to lung cancer. One of them even appeared in an anti-tobacco commercial.

Tobacco irony

That’s fair irony to point out, but it seems to me that a deeper irony was that these diamond-hard men, who became symbols of extreme individualism, needed others to care for them when they were no longer strong and healthy.

Sometimes there are also “Marlboro women”! The objectivist-individualist philosopher Ayn Rand, whose novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have been so influential in shaping economic policy in the US and UK, was dead-set against social security. However, there is some evidence that she accepted social security and medicare towards the end of her life, justifying this as getting back what had been supposedly “stolen” from her in taxes!

When relationships fail

Well, in the end, we have only God and those priceless gifts of God — one another. Hence it is so tragic when the normal network of human support upon which we depend fails us, or we fail it, or both.

Sometimes things have come to a point where a relationship of mutual love and support has become exactly the opposite — a mutually destructive alienation. In such cases, the only possible course may be to cut these toxic ties and fall back on other, tried and tested ones. Hence, when a woman separates from an abusive male partner, she will often return to the protection of the mother’s home and family.

The pope’s intention asks us to seek to heal wounded relationships, if that is possible. This is particularly appropriate in the Holy Year.

A jubilee is traditionally a time to restore the delicate balances in our human relationships which can get out of kilter over time through our neglect and selfishness. Indentured workers are to be liberated, debts are to be forgiven, relationships restored, inequalities reduced. To do this, we will also need to renew our spiritual lives and our relationship with God.

Let us live this Jubilee, this Holy Year, seeking to restore where possible and strengthen that divinely-given net of relationships which we so often take for granted and undervalue, especially in our family life.