Marshal Your Troops at the Narrow Gate

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/BIC-Mass-Blog-for-the-21st-Sunday-in-Ordinary-Time-2025.mp3)

If you’re a movie fan, try reading this Sunday’s letter from Paul to the Hebrews (Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13) as George C. Scott might have in his Oscar-winning role as General George S. Patton waging the key battle of World War II:

“My son, endure your trials as discipline. … God treats you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?”

This is not an empty Actor’s Studio exercise. It’s worth knowing that the real General “Blood & Guts” had a prayer life he felt put him as close to God as St. Paul was. Read the end of the Acts of the Apostles, and you’ll see Paul’s mission objective was threatened by bad weather, just as Patton’s was in the Battle of the Bulge. Yet both leaders would testify that divine intervention saved their missions.

Patton would later credit two “Good Weather” prayers for turning the tide at The Battle of the Bulge: the one he personally directed to God and one he ordered his chaplain to write and distribute to the 250,000 men fighting under his command. In both, God is addressed as their commanding officer.

Patton is said to have offered up the following prayer while on his knees in a Luxembourg City chapel on December 23, 1944:

“Sir, this is Patton speaking. The last fourteen days have been straight from hell. … You know without me telling You that the 101^st Airborne is holding out against tremendous odds in Bastogne, and that this continual storm is making it impossible to supply them even from the air…. You must come to my assistance, so that I may dispatch the entire German Army as a birthday present to Your Prince of Peace.  Amen”

Contrast that with the following, more refined prayer, written by Col. James Hugh O’Neill, Patton’s Third Army Chaplain, printed on a card, and distributed to the troops for their recitation:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.

The troops must have struggled to find a quiet sanctuary in their hearts to recite this prayer with Patton’s passion. Yet in Sunday’s gospel reading (Luke 13:22-30), Jesus commands us to seek the shelter of God’s kingdom by entering the narrow gate. That’s an entrance known only to God’s intimates—who continually knock on its door through good and bad weather.

Contrast that with the flailing of strangers who publicly decry the idea of befriending some unnamed god. But then at the last minute, out of desperation, they show up at God’s front door to present their list of demands. Waiting until the last minute of an ungodly hour gives them the assurance they won’t be seen by fellow non-believers who might mistake their self-justifications as praying. Jesus answers their tentative tapping at God’s front door with this warning worthy of the best doorbell security system:

‘I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!’

In Sunday’s first reading (Isaiah 66:18-21), Isaiah tells us God recruits survivors who’ve battled valiantly to know a power higher than themselves. They’re uniquely gifted to gather and notify nations who’ve never known such a power.

I will send survivors to the nations … which have never heard of my fame, or seen my glory; and they shall proclaim my glory. They shall bring all your kin from all the nations as an offering to the LORD.

Upon this huge gathering of troops at the narrow gate, there’s a 100 percent chance the Son will shine.

–Tom Andel