 Thursday, March 02, 2006
Lent, like March, began with a lion – the Old Testament words of Jeff Culbreath who posted letters from pontiffs who took seriously their responsibility to their flock. The words singe with alacrity, a rousing from the tyranny of inertia and “the way things are” and too easeful moving between the sacred and the secular. My malaise seems self-inflicted. I realized today at church, while praying the psalms, how much I needed to pray the psalms. And why haven’t I? Why haven’t I drunk from the rich font of past papal encyclicals, of wise saints and the Church Fathers? How can I have missed Psalm 71 with its infant baptism reverberations: Upon you I have leaned from my birth;I give God the mealy portion of a daily “get-it-over-with” Mass and little else. Given this time, I could at least use it prayerfully and by reading great books instead of blogging. Imagine the spiritual classics, not the least of which the bible, I could read. How hard it really is to say I am open to God! And yet in the fire of prayer it all seems irrelevant, myself that is, my condition, my self-criticism, my judgment. In the fire of real prayer perspective and priorities emerge only to immediately dissipate afterwards, like mirages in the desert. There is really only realness, and Realness means being willing to endure pain and/or discomfort, whether psychically or physically, and not being afraid of intimacy, illness, another’s egotism, another’s apostasy, another’s lack of prayerfulness, all these things I leave as burdens on Christ. While with fasting I’m allergic to feelings of holiness, or at least suspicious of it as feeling good about myself because of my actions, one has little recourse but to feel good about oneself because it is only then you can, in a sense, get over yourself. By dwelling on my inadequacies I am distracted from God. (3) comments • • • • • |
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