“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

This was the personal motto of Pope St. Pius X. Translated, it means “to restore (or establish) all things in Christ.”

I found it while I was looking for an appropriately sacred (and perhaps a bit erudite) new closing for emails. Serendipitously, I also happen to be a parishioner at Pope Saint Pius X Catholic Church in Coeur d’Alene so it first perfectly.

I’ve been on a journey, as we all have or at least all should be, the past 45 years. I’ve “worshipped” different things along the way, as we all do. Worship, after all, can mean giving undue attention and we give undue attention to things when we put them above God, if even for a moment.

It’s a commandment we break and a sin we commit on a daily basis without fully realizing it. It’s also the first commandment of the Big Ten and I’m certain that’s not by accident. Besides being one of the easiest to break—don’t let anyone tell you it only applies to those who kneel down before a statue of a Golden Calf or Moloch—it is also the most important, for from it, all other sin is found. Whether it is murder, theft, lying, or cheating, when we sin, we elevate other things above God. Moreover, even when we’re not consciously breaking one of the other “Big Ten”, even when we’re perhaps doing something otherwise honorable and uplifting, say cheering on our kids in a Little League game or volunteering our time for a cause we believe in, if we put that activity above God and if God is not forefront in our mind while we’re doing it, it has the potential to become an idol.

Eric Liddell was an Olympic short and middle distance runner. One of his oft repeated quotes is “I believe God made me for a purpose. He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.” Running glorified God. Still, he refused to run on a Sunday, something that likely cost Liddell some victories. Later in life, he served as a missionary in China and ended up dying of a brain tumor while prisoner in an internment camp during World War II. His fellow prisoners told many stories of his selflessness toward others and complete surrender to God.

I’m not even a fraction of the man Eric Liddell ever was, but I do hope, as I continue this journey, that I will grow closer and closer to God and that, in all things I do, I will contribute, if even slightly, to restoring all things in Christ.

This blog is a compendium of many of the essays I’ve written since my college days (with one letter to my high school newspaper preceding them all). While I’ve been far from perfect in my past and believed things I now know to be foolish, I’ve always, by the Grace of God, sought the divine, however imperfectly I’ve gone about it.

If you go deep into the archives, you’ll also likely notice that politics, specifically Republican politics, was an idol of mine for several years and corresponding with that period, I wrote for my college newspaper and later for, at the time, one of the most widely read political blogs in Washington State. (It no longer exists.) I also interned during that time in the Washington State Senate and part of my job was to write op-eds under the byline of some of our state senators. I’ve posted almost all of them so you can see the unvarnished twenty and early thirty-something me.

I more or less stand by most of the opinions I held then. The big exception is the neocon view of “Team America: World Police” that so many on the “right” foolishly held to thinking we were freeing oppressed people or something. I now know that our friends on the “left” were right to be opposed to the Iraq War. Ironically, some of those same people now seem to hold many of the same views as the chickenhawks they opposed then. Politics makes strange bedfellows, indeed, I suppose. Beyond that, while my views may be more of less the same, I’ve certainly become more nuanced and less punchy, as we all tend to do as we grow older and mature.

In any case, keep all that in mind if you read some of the older essays. (I’ve made the occasional editorial comment on some of them if my views have drastically changed.) I am but an imperfect pilgrim on a journey toward a perfect place, one that I shall not reach until I am fully sanctified through trial, tribulation, and the cleansing Blood of Christ.

Instaurare omnia in Christo,
Mark Griswold