Milestones and Landmarks - A Few Reflections

I have fought a good fight,

I have finished my course,

I have kept the faith

(II Timothy 4:7, Douay-Rheims version)

Finishing a race, or coming through a struggle, doesn't mean that you have permanent retirement.  As a matter of fact, the success with which one finishes the last race or overcomes the last fight prepares and sets up one for the next race or battle.  In this life, there is a constant journey, which at times is like walking, but can also be a race in itself in which one's future depends on the successful completion of the race itself.  This is where I have been at the past couple of months.  2018 opened up with one of the most intense courses of my life, as I embarked upon finishing up a long-overdue Master's degree by preparing for my comprehensive exams in my program, which I took at the end of January.  Although most of the results of that test have come in, I am still waiting for the entire grade on the exam, which then determines if I will be awarded the degree.  It is not as ominous as it sounds, being I actually knew my material better than I thought, so I don't anticipate a problem.  But, sometimes the "waiting game" is the most difficult course to tackle, and that is where I am at as I write this today.  But, I had the idea of a good devotional, which also comes at a good time in the Church calendar as well, being Lent starts tomorrow - Lent too is a race to run for all of us, especially faithful Catholics, in that it pushes us to grow in our own spirituality.  The arrival of Lent and the completion of my comprehensive exams correspond also to another landmark in my life - 32 years ago this past Friday, I was baptized.  All of this together is a reminder to me personally of both how far I have come on my journey of faith, and how much I still have to travel.  And, so it is with all our lives. 

Back a few weeks ago, as I was preparing to take my exams, I had an unusual dream one night.  In it, I was in what looked like a dormitory of some sort, and a teacher I remembered from high school was sort of watching over all of us in it.  I was instructed to first partake of a light meal - a nourishing soup of some nature and a blood orange - and then was told I needed to rest, and therefore I was to lay in a small cot and just rest.  It was in this dream I was also anticipating the same bit of anxiety that I was feeling over my upcoming exams, and there was a message in the dream that spoke to me and has stuck with me.  The following Scripture sums it up:

In peace I will lay down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety

(Psalm 4:8)

The message God was trying to send me in that dream, at least I believe, was that He was telling me that all is going to be fine because He is in control of things, and now I need to just rest.  In combining it with the earlier Scripture, a clear message appears - by taking the effort to fight the good faith and prevailing, one needs to rest and enjoy the overcoming they have achieved, and also be assured that God is granting rest from a fight that was well-fought.  Taking these exams was a race, a struggle, for me, and as such it was something I have done with all my strength and God has seen it.  Now, He is telling me to rest.  I still have a little anxiety about the final numbers when they come in, and the wait can be excruciating, but I also know that I have got this.  More importantly, God has this.  A milestone, in other words, will soon be a landmark, and let me explain that further.

The purpose of a landmark is to commemorate something, while a milestone is an achievement.  Milestones are reached, while landmarks are established.  They can have the same meaning, but there is also an important difference.  A landmark sets a sort of standard for one thing - it is something we commemorate by going back to on occasion, and it stands as a monument to achieving a victory over something. A milestone, in other words, is an achievement that is based on an established set of goals.  A milestone is reached when the goal is achieved, or a step toward the goal is achieved.  To turn a milestone into a landmark, the path of the goal must be completed - the completed goal then becomes a landmark with many milestones leading to it.  Getting an advanced degree in school in essence qualifies as both - it takes a number of milestones to achieve the goal of a graduate degree, and those milestones include other degrees earned, what is learned, etc.  The accomplishment then becomes a landmark as it then is permanent and becomes a point of reference in one's legacy.  Landmarks are also identified by tangible symbols - a diploma, the hood that a person with a Master's or a doctorate earns, and the letters that can now be carried as a suffix to one's name.  Milestones are identified by other things - the grade transcript, the test scores, etc.  Those are milestones toward a greater objective.  Like an academic achievement, the Christian life is characterized by similar things.

Milestones of the Christian life are the Sacraments, but the identification of one as a Christian is embodied in a landmark - the Cross of Christ.  All of the Sacraments lead to the ultimate Landmark, the Lord Jesus Christ, and everything we believe, practice, and profess points to Him, as the late Josef Jungmann affirmed with the imagery of Jesus as the hub of a wheel in his seminal 1936 text The Good News and the Proclamation of Our Faith.  Jungmann notes that the doctrines of the faith radiate from the hub - Jesus - like spokes from a wheel, and in the same way the spokes extend from the hub, they also lead one back to the hub as well.  Jesus's by the Apostle St. Paul as the "Chief Cornerstone" in Ephesians 2:20 is a way of saying Jesus is that ultimate Landmark of our faith.  He is the source of our faith, and He is also its destination.  This is why all we believe, teach, and proclaim must always point back to Christ, and that is something I learned very thoroughly in four years of intense study at Steubenville.  Lent serves to remind us of that too - it shows us that we need to put aside those distractions and use this time to focus on our walk with Christ, thus placing Him back at the center of our faith.  The sacrifice of abstinence and fasting during Lent then serve as milestones leading us to the Landmark, the Chief Cornerstone, Jesus Christ. 

Sometimes though it is important between the trek between two of these milestones to just rest.  The Christian life is one that has at its core a struggle - it is the struggle of our will, the influences of a godless society, and God's will, and Lent serves to challenge us that we are to submit our will to God's, since Christ has now made us part of the kingdom through the sacramental life of the Church.  Much like the rigorous study for an exam, Lenten abstinence and fasting serves as preparation for us to know Christ better.  Some Protestants ignorantly and perjoratively condemn Lenten observance as being somehow a carryover from some imagined pagan ritual or something, but their accusations are baseless and devoid of common sense when they fail to realize that we all should strive toward closer communion with the Savior we claim to follow.  So, since my own conversion, I find it very disconcerting to hear Protestant fundamentalists bash Lent, yet they boast of their own "walks with Jesus."  It is our responsibility to pray for the ongoing conversion of the ignorant, and hopefully one day many of the people making these false accusations will understand that much of their own misconceptions are based more on anti-Catholicism than they are on actual truth.  We need to be careful of letting our own likes and dislikes color our faith, because we end up in doing so denying some very precious aspects of the Christian faith that can enrich us spiritually.

As this is the Tuesday before Lent, many of my fellow Catholics are finishing up their paczkis and pancakes, as they prepare for the Lenten season.  Let us remember though that Lent is not about giving up social media and eating fish sticks and cheese pizzas for the next few Fridays - it is about much more than that.  It is about a time of both pressing toward milestones, and for some it may be God calling them to rest - putting aside the craziness of our over-technicalized world and seeking to find Christ in the quiet place is a great rest for many of us, so we should consider Lent a time God is also calling us to rest in Him.  May we take that call seriously.

Likewise, for those of us facing other challenges, we need to remember something very important - God has this!  We have put in the hard work to get to that milestone, so now time to sit back and relax for a while.  I speak to myself as well as others, and hope too that through writing this I can even take my own advice to heart.  Hope to see you all again soon.