Unbreakable

“God, I want to dream again
Take me where I’ve never been
I want to go there
This time I’m not scared
Now I am unbreakable, it’s unmistakable
No one can touch me
Nothing can stop me.”

The lyrics are from a song called “Unbreakable,” sung by a Christian rock group called Fireflight. I don’t know if they are still around, but go and have a listen (www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWRJAHaOrYg). I am sure they speak to anyone, Christian or not, who has been betrayed, scarred, abused or whose faith and trust have been shattered.

When I listened this song on YouTube, I was struck by many of the comments — in so many languages and from so many people. Here are just a few of them:

•  “I didn’t realize they were a Christian band when I first listened to Fireflight. I just thought, ‘Wow are these guys positive!’ The only thing you have to believe in is the music.”

•  “I’m Muslim but this song pretty awesome.”

•  “Agnostic, but this is a good song.”

•  “Just realized this band is Christian. I’m atheist. Hell, I still love them.”

The Gospel is inherently attractive, however it is sung. Not everyone hearing a song like this will pick up its inherently Christian themes, but if you Google the lyrics, you will see that it is all about deliverance and about a faith that there is someone who will take you from a very dark place, free you from fear and bring you to where it is safe to dream again.

Isn’t that the hope and cry of every human being? Isn’t Jesus everyone’s Savior?

The unmistakable conclusion of the song is that, with God to trust in, each and every one of us is — unbreakable! We are called to live in God forever, and nothing can kill or destroy us if we trust in the one who punched a hole in the tomb that even he himself was wrapped up and thrown into. Death could not contain him; nor will it overpower us who believe.

Infidelity is a storm few marriages will weather. The scars run so deep. The memories of being used, abused and discarded by someone whom we thought we could trust and love are so painful to recall. We do not want to look back, and yet we wish we could and that what we hoped might have been different actually could be.

The nightmare threatens to rise again, coloring how we see everything, even new relationships. Jesus gives us a place in which to be safe, a new body and renewed spirit to live in, a way of seeing reality not just through our past, but toward the future he is preparing for us in every moment of our life into which he breathes the blessing of his love.

At baptism, each of us received that God-seed, the breath of the Holy Spirit. The kernel of eternal life was planted firmly in our souls and watered by the sacramental life of the Church. Maybe, at some point, we stopped drinking in that life. Maybe someone or something — some experience, traumatic or insidious — abruptly or gradually dimmed its light. Our sense of God’s presence dulled and dampened and we begin to feel alone, abandoned, numbed.

Those whose soul-fire has been cruelly quenched by the ravages of sexual abuse by a spiritual father bear the intensity of this pain like none else. So many priests long for the opportunity to restore, or at least to ask for the chance, to renew their own ordination pledge: to seek out the lost and wounded as Jesus commanded them.

Many of the faithful also want to renew their own baptismal promises to be the disciples Jesus calls us all to be, taking the message of his abiding presence into the world God loves.

At the diocesan Eucharistic Congress at the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville, during the 10:30 a.m. Mass on Sept. 22, priests, deacons and faithful alike will have the privilege of renewing those promises and pledging to one another our vocational commitments. We need one another’s prayer and support!

Speaking as your Bishop, in union with our clergy, I can tell you with confidence that nothing will encourage us more to be the shepherds you need and want us to be than the personal presence of you and your family and loved ones on that day.

When all is said and done, nothing will renew our Diocese more than a total consecration to the eucharistic presence of Jesus Christ in our lives, “so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor 5:21) who thirsts for our souls. United to him and in him alone, we can dream again, restored to lives that are truly — unbreakable.

(Learn more about this historic diocesan event at www.rcda.org/HeartsAflame. Follow the Bishop at www.face­book.com/AlbanyBishopEd and on Twitter @AlbBishopEd.)