In this sign you will conquer.

Do you ever get the urge to make the sign of the cross at the oddest moments--crossing the street, beginning a new task at work? One can assume it's the gentle prodding of the Holy Spirit. As John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote, "Whene'r across this sinful flesh of mine / I draw the Holy Sign, / All good thoughts stir within me and renew / Their slumbering strength divine; / Till there springs up a courage high and true /To suffer and to do."

Regretfully, I have responded to this impulse, if at all, in a furtive manner. Funny how such moments produce the struggle. Would making a sign of the cross open the faith, or me, to ridicule? Should one even be concerned about this? I love to see, for example, baseball players making the sign of the cross when stepping up to the plate, but others scoff that this is merely a superstitious ritual.

Ah well, as the poet says, "Not men shall judge me, but God"--and God alone knows the heart. And it is "the movement of the heart" with which the sign of the cross, the premier sacramental of the Church, is concerned. Remember, if you will, that a sacramental is that which is blessed by the Church to excite the mind to good thoughts and increase devotion.

The difficulty attendant on making a visible sign of reverence in a secular world can be referred to as "the politics of prayer". It's all about purity of motive. Are we praying, or making a political statement? It's impossible to separate the two at times. As we achingly inch towards purity of heart, we can be seduced by spiritual brinkmanship. Verbal prayers can be a thinly disguised rebuke to those (you know who you are) who are being irksome. Spontaneous Mass intentions can spiral into a competition as to who can bring the most obscure or heartrending situation to our attention. Yet who can deny that prayer in all these cases is needed?

But I digress. The point is how does one attempt to mend what Vatican II (Gaudium et spes, #43) referred to as "the split between the faith one professes and one's daily life"--which is one of the "most serious errors of our age"? Mending the split requires practice, practice, practice, until living the faith is second nature, or grace reclaiming our true, and first, nature. This brings to mind an incident involving my mother, who, arrested many years ago for blocking the doors to an abortion "clinic," was hanging out in a holding cell with a bunch of other scofflaws. One of these was lamenting her dreary life, and the fact that of course she'd been framed, when my mother piped up, "You need the Lord."

The entire world stopped, and jaws in unison dropped--or so it seemed. With that one irrefutable statement, a ray of lovely light shone in that prowling, restless place. (That that jail is God-forsaken is more apparent than real; as the psalmist tells us, God is close to the broken-hearted, and jail is full of broken hearts.)

"You need the Lord." My mom could pull that off because pretty much every inch of her believed what she said. Conviction can be a great conversation-stopper. But I know for a fact that I couldn't have said that. For one thing, I didn't want to get beaten up (not that I would have) or hassled in any way, thanks all the same. As for my mom, by the end of her month's sentence she was being called "Cookum" (that's Cree for "granny") by a number of inmates (and "Granny Con" by the press).

The other reason I'll put down to temperament. There are those more disposed to self-doubt than others; as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "O, the mind, mind has mountains; Cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap/May who ne'er hung there." When it comes to publicly witnessing to the faith, in even the most discreet way, these so-afflicted souls suffer dread agonies. God alone knows what they're up against.

Well, it's not supposed to be easy, is it? It is the sign of the cross, after all. Nor can Satan's machinations be overlooked; he's none too pleased to be warded off by this powerful sacramental. Perhaps reflecting on these lines of Cardinal Newman as to the efficacy of the sign of the cross will provide the motivation needed to carry through the impulse: "And who shall say, but hateful spirits around, / For their brief hour unbound/Shudder to see, and wail their overthrow? / While on far heathen ground / Some lonely saint hails the fresh odor, though / Its source he cannot know?"

Lianne Laurence writes from Burnaby, BC, and is the author of the newly published book Borowski: A Canadian Paradox.