Solo vir in terram

Over the course of the last few days, I have felt more alone than I have ever felt. I won't go into all the details, but let me just assure you that being a liberal Catholic in a rural, eastern Utah city is not the easiest thing to do.
Today I went to Mass. Yes, normally I don't spend too much time telling about my own personal experiences, but what I heard was very reassuring. Today is the Feast Day of the Transfiguration. All the readings had to do with Discipleship. Father Albert's homily, though, was most especially helpful. He told us that, as the Disciples, we must learn to stand with Christ especially when we are on the mountains of our life, both the good ones and the bad ones. It was an especially well-timed message about how God will never desert us and how we must, in turn, not abandon Him.
And so I am thinking about Discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose name appears in this blog quite frequently, is my ideal model for Discipleship. Bonhoeffer was a devout Christian who was abandoned by his faith (the Lutherans), his country, and seemingly his God. His family never did abandon him, but his life was nonetheless nowhere near perfect.
In about 1930 he published a work entitled The Cost of Discipleship, in which he basically told his readers how difficult being a Christian can be. No, it didn't smack of the same self-sacrificial language that his fellow Lutheran and predecessor Kierkegaard embraces, but it did include plenty of self-denial. To him, we must be ready to "climb up on the cross with Jesus." This is a hard request, to deny ourselves of our comforts that we so often think are ours to take. It is a hard request to take upon ourselves shame and sorrow. It is hard to deny all that we have for Christ's name sake.
This is all very well and good to write about safely from the Seminary which he had founded. However, the true test of his Discipleship would come more than ten years later when he was imprisoned by the NAZIs for instructing his students to not enlist in the army. Now, it is important to understand that he had plenty of chances to avoid this. He had been to New York a few years prior and his friends there had asked him not to return to Germany, but to stay in the states where he would be safe. Even when he had returned to Germany, when rumors of his arrest began to circulate, his friends offered to help him escape. However, humble and submissive, he allowed the NAZIs to take him. He had many students, loving parents, a fiancee, and a group of faithful disciples that he left behind. His contemporaries, like Karl Barth, escaped NAZI persecution in other countries. Eventually, he was moved to a Concentration Camp and days before Allied relief, was hung by the SS. This is a man who never backed away from his principles and truly lived a Christian life.
Another figure I think of is the one of Job, from the Bible. He was a man who lost literally everything. He lost his children, his lands, his wife, his livestock and even his health. He had nothing going for him. Eventually, he did murmur against the Lord, but in the end he is taught a valuable lesson about how the Lord works.
Others have done the same. There are many, many Christian martyrs whose faith was sealed with their blood. Ss Perpetua and Felicity, St Joan of Arc, Justin Martyr, and countless others have stood by their Christian faith as others killed them.
Whatever reason we are put through trials and hardships, I firmly believe that our character there is a reason. Perhaps they will test our faith. Perhaps they will test our character. Perhaps they will strengthen us as people. Or perhaps others will watch and judge us by our actions. Do we suffer all things willingly, as Kierkegaard tells us to? Do we take on Christ's cross? Do we stay with our faith, rather than abandoning it?
Rather than getting overabundantly preachy on the subject, I offer this simple question: will we find ourselves more happy in life if we do not lose faith than if we do? We might feel like a shipwrecked sailor alone in the squall at times, but will we truly find peace by succumbing to the tempest? So perhaps, Christian or not, believer or atheist, we might find ourselves enjoying our lives a little more if we learn to accept difficulties gracefully.