We're In The Home Stretch

We're in the home stretch in our work for 2025. Once we pass Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls, it's on to Thanksgiving, Advent and...Christmas. Voila!

Depending on our business, our bosses, and our goals for the year, it's likely some combination of push and pressure will mix with the secular and religious themes we all face.

For the secular, there's Thanksgiving and then the "Christmas Season." As we know, the secular world considers the Christmas Season to begin sometime in October. That's when commercial interests begin touting their products as Christmas gifts and entice us to get in the "holiday spirit" - a tool to get us to bite on their advertising. "Holiday Music" abounds on some radio and internet stations. You know the drill.

For the religious, if we try to keep a relatively Catholic focus, Advent begins right after Thanksgiving. And while we try not to celebrate Christmas long before it arrives, we do still have to attend to preparation, including home decoration and, yes, shopping for gifts, etc. Our challenge: remain recollected in the Advent discipline and spirit before releasing full-blown Christmas on - you guessed - Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and throughout the real Christmas Season.

In the face of all this, the push and pressure percolates either below the surface, on it, or right in your face, depending on individual circumstance. 

One of our antidotes to facing distractions and various challenges and difficulties in our work over the years has been our dear friend, Father Willie Doyle. From time to time, he wrote about the horrors he faced in his work as a chaplain serving in the trenches of World War I. And so we present this rather harrowing account by way of contrast to any possible distractions and difficulties we might face during this home stretch.  

“I was standing about 100 yards away watching a party of my men crossing the valley, when I saw the earth under their feet open and the twenty men disappear in a cloud of smoke, while a column of stones and clay was shot a couple of hundred feet into the air. A big German shell by the merest chance had landed in the middle of the party. I rushed down the slope, getting a most unmerciful whack between the shoulders, probably from a falling stone, as it did not wound me, but it was no time to think of one’s safety. I gave them all a General Absolution, scraped the clay from the faces of a couple of buried men who were not wounded, and then anointed as many of the poor lads as I could reach. Two of them had no faces to anoint and others were ten feet under the clay, but a few were living still. By this time half a dozen volunteers had run up and were digging the buried men out. War may be horrible, but it certainly brings out the best side of a man’s character; over and over again I have seen men risking their lives to help or save a comrade, and these brave fellows knew the risk they were taking, for when a German shell falls in a certain place, you clear as quickly as you can since several more are pretty certain to land close. It was a case of duty for me, but real courage for them. We dug like demons for our lad’s lives and our own, to tell the truth, for every few minutes another iron pill from a Krupp gun would come tearing down the valley, making our very hearts leap into our mouths. More than once we were well sprinkled with clay and stones, but the cup of cold water promise was well kept, and not one of the party received a scratch. We got three buried men out alive, not much the worse for their trying experience, but so thoroughly had the shell done its work that there was not a single wounded man in the rest of the party; all had gone to a better land. As I walked back I nearly shared the fate of my boys, but somehow escaped again, and pulled out two more lads who were only buried up to the waist and uninjured. Meanwhile the regiment had been ordered back to a safer position on the hill, and we were able to breathe once more.”

The men’s resting place that night consisted of some open shell holes. “To make matters worse,” writes Fr. Doyle “we were posted fifteen yards in front of two batteries of field guns, while on our right a little further off were half a dozen huge sixty-pounders; not once during the whole night did these guns cease firing.” This proximity not only contributed an ear-splitting din but added considerably to the men’s risk owing to the occasional premature bursting of the shells. In spite of these discomforts and the torrential downpour of rain, the men slept out of sheer weariness. “I could not help thinking,” says Fr. Doyle, “of Him who often had nowhere to lay His head, and it helped me to resemble Him a little.”

Whatever we have to deal with to manage our home stretch will likely be far from anything Father Willie faced during this terrible battle. Perhaps we can ask him for his intercession to help us keep our nose to the grindstone at work and remain true to our Catholic sensibility in the coming days.