This morning at Church our pastor, Brother Jerry, spoke of the scripture message to free the prisoners. Our Church is next to two large jails and has a major prison ministry. But he made us aware that some of the prisons we find ourselves in are self made.

One of the things of Advent, the waiting time before Christmas, is to “wake up”. Often because of fear or just not wanting to know we walk unaware and insensitive to our daily lives. I feel we have an obligation to wake ourselves up and live fully in the present but also to try to wake others up, even when it means disturbing the conscience of others.

Sometimes we wake up or disturb others when we are just trying to be true to ourselves. In last night’s posting told you about the experience of my friend, Frank, whose latest article on his blog Father At War was about his experience with an Army recruiter trying to recruit his son. Frank, being a pacifist, simply explains to the recruiter, his son, and all of us reading the blog his sincere beliefs.

A few of his friends are fellow West Point graduates who he is still in contact with, while most just ignore him and his message. One of his friends was really disturbed by the recent entry The Recruiter and took it as a personal attack on him and let Frank know about it. Frank appreciates friends that recognize him rather than ignore him but his blog was not an attack on anyone.

I find myself in this same position, especially being ignored on the message of Marquette, a Jesuit Catholic University should not be teaching war on campus. When someone attacks me it is for my delivery of the message not the message. The message seems to disturb their conscience and rather than deal with it they ignore the message and ignore or attack the messenger.

When this happens Frank or I can put ourselves in a self imposed prison fearing we might offend someone or we can continue, with reflections, speaking, writing and acting on our conscience. This way we can stay out of prison.

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