It is easy to live Christianity by simply attending mass on Sunday and being a nice person the rest of the week. However, true Catholicism is active and it calls people to live in such a way that we show the love of Christ in all that we do.

This does not mean that we do not pray, that would be ridiculous; we pray and our work comes out of our prayer. This is an essential part of what it means to be Catholic. This means that we act on our faith. When we do this, we live a tightrope walking faith and sometimes I mean that almost literally. Often times we think of the faithful person as living in perfect safety and doing God’s work. Sometimes this work can be dangerous and even deadly. The reason why we have martyrs is that it can be dangerous to be a Christian. Martyrs lived their faith at the level of the tightrope.

In my own experience, at times, I prayed terrified before the Blessed Sacrament for something that I had to do or say that would get me in trouble. I learned over the years that rarely has what I most feared come to fruition. What if my fear paralyzed me into what we Catholics call the sin of omission? Sometimes, we have to take serious risks; we have to be the tightrope walker. The more we do it, the more dangerous it is, but the more we learn better how to walk the tightrope.

Jesus needs clowns, but He also needs tightrope walkers and sometimes He calls us to be one and sometimes the other. If we are really going to live our faith, then we are going to take the risk at times of walking that tightrope even when we would rather just clown around.

The tightrope walker may volunteer at a soup kitchen, may speak out for someone who does not have a voice, may stand up for the truth. Each of these and so many other things take courage and resolve. This means that unlike the circus performer, the Catholic form of the tightrope walker can be quite unpopular, even among Catholics. After all, Jesus’ biggest critics were some of His fellow Jews.

We need to start asking ourselves in prayer, do we have what it takes to be a tightrope walker, or are we going to go through life living on the level of the safety net. If we choose to do the latter, we will never experience true Christianity. If we choose to do the former, we will only succeed when we rely completely on Jesus working through us and when we trust in His love for us and for others.

from Being Catholic Agents for Change by Fr. Robert J Carr. Link is not affiliated with the New Song Community or the Archdiocese of Boston