What was your first reaction when you saw this picture in my feed? For a whole lot of people, it was anger, expressed in sentences like this, “I’d like to find this kid and punch him in the face.”  For many others, it was a lot more – death threats sent to the parents, an angry mob that gathered outside of Covington Catholic High School, which caused the school to shut down and only reopen today under heavy police protection. Disney film producer, Jack Morrissey, best known for his work on ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and the ‘Twilight’ saga, published the image of someone being stuffed into a woodchipper, complete with blood being spewed out onto the snow late on Saturday, accompanied by the comment “#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper.”

If you felt, or are continuing to feel, any such rage against Nick Sandmann, the young man in the now famous picture that has spread all over the world by social media, perhaps you should take a deep breath, stand back for a moment, and reflect on what you have become. I know I have.

What? You?

Well, yes. Like a number of other Catholics, when I first read the faux story of the encounter between Nick and Nathan Phillips, I was outraged – but at the wrong person. I was angry at what I erroneously perceived to be yet another Catholic behaving badly in public and giving a terrible witness to the Catholic faith. Typical of  many people who jumped to a conclusion before all the facts were in, I’m sure I said at least one derogatory thing about Nick on Facebook in a com box.

THIS IS MY PUBLIC APOLOGY. I WAS WRONG!! NICK, I ASK YOUR FORGIVENESS. YOU ARE A CLASS-ACT AND A GOOD EXAMPLE OF HOW A CHRISTIAN SHOULD RESPOND TO HATRED AND INTOLERANCE.

But worse than this, after the facts came out and the Liberal media and Liberals in general are making threats to this young man and his family, I found myself wanting to hurt these media liars in my rage against their lies and what they are doing to destroy this country. In allowing rage to take over my thought processes, I found myself thinking and fantasizing about a number of responses which are not allowed to a true disciple of Christ, such as shooting Liberals or dragging them out of their news rooms and beating them senseless. In my anger, I made a number of postings on Facebook suggesting that this sort of vindictive behavior is what we, as persecuted Catholics, need to do to these, our enemies.

Where in hell do such thoughts come from? Well, clearly from its lower levels. And responding emotionally, I gave into them, to my shame. (Going to Confession -again!) Such hatred, rage, anger, and a desire to severely hurt those who are our perceived (and real) enemies, is not of the Holy Spirit. This is the danger of the divided America in which we live. We – all of us, Left and Right –  are destroying ourselves spiritually in our fantasy that such anger and threats towards those with whom we disagree are entirely justified. I have read a copious amount of such thoughts in the com boxes of various news feeds reporting on this injustice. The people who are angry with the media are, in many cases, Evangelicals or Catholics who are suggesting things like: beating them, horsewhipping, hanging, shooting, etc., accompanied by a wide-range of name-calling, a lot of it not printable in polite company.

We all need to step back and look at what the devil is doing to us as a nation. Nobody seems to be thinking of the spiritual implications of the hatred that is setting itself deep into the American consciousness like an iron peg driven into ice. This is the deeper reality of our current culture – we are dying spiritually, step by step. The hatred of some people – on both Left and Right – is palpable.

The faith of Christ is love – the religion of the devil is hate. Those of us who are Christians need to follow the example of young Nick Sandmann, not responding with name-calling and threats towards those who hate us, but cleansing our hearts to love and our lips to pray for them. Nick’s behavior was exemplary. When confronted and in a tense situation, he said that he just “gave him a smile.” How sad that the media took a photo of this smile from a certain angle, made it look like a smirk, then created a whole false narrative. Their actions have deepened an already sharp ideological divide in this country. Worse than that, as the journalists in the Liberal media continue to promote such hatred and division, they are wrecking their own souls, estranging themselves from God and His love:

Galatians 5:19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, 20 Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, 21 envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

Matthew 5:44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

I cannot avoid the truth: Christ calls me to pray for those who hate me, for my persecutors, and to do good to my enemies. Dragging them out in the street and beating them is hardly in line with His command. That I would entertain such thoughts shows a serious level of spiritual immaturity on my part.

This is where we are as a country. It appears to me that a vast number of people have sadly neither interest in God nor His Church. Among the rest of us, our spirituality is being destroyed by the easy way in which we respond with thoughts of evil towards those with whom we disagree. This is the world the devil wants to create, a world in which God’s love is not known and it is every man for himself. There is no sense of community, no sense of others being our brothers and sisters, just an ever-increasing divide and increasing violence.

In a day when the Church is being reviled (and rightly so) for the rampant hypocrisy of its leaders, young Mr. Sandmann was given an opportunity to show what a true Christian response to a bad situation looks like. He owned that moment, showing what a great grasp he has on his faith. It is my hope that some people will see his actions and rethink their hatred. I hope they will come to understand that what Nick showed was a true example of the Christian faith, and not the hatred that is so easily flowing in the media and in the hearts of so many these days.

As for me, this has been yet another wake-up call from the Holy Spirit. A sixteen-year-old kid shows more maturity than I have as a seventy-year-old man. If you are a Christian and have – as I have done – entertained thoughts of harm or violence against those who are attacking the Church and Christian decency, I invite you to join me in repentance and prayer for those who hate us and wish us harm.