When Emotions are Stilled

Some days are lessons, and some days are practice of those lessons.

If last week's lessons included discerning the steadiness of God's activity in my life despite emotional roller coasters that swirl at the same time, then today's practice is recognizing that same activity, that same presence, the same reality of God when there is no emotional engagement at all.

This kind of thing can take on roller coaster dimensions if one allows it to, and if one requires a certain level of emotional ruckus to feel alive.

Emotional ruckus is not mandatory, though.

A day like today (when my digestive system is recovering from a mid-night disturbance) reminds me that God's presence with me is something I open myself to and become aware of, not something I generate or need to generate by working myself into any kind of state. He is the Ever-Existing; I am His creation. I am not responsible for Him; He is responsible for me.

In other words, I can feel sick and peaceful, because I know God's presence with me is not dependent on my ability to conjure Him up.

It seems what I've been meditating on here recently rhymes with St. Therese's notion of spiritual childhood. He does everything. I bury my head in His chest, and what He puts in my hand, I pass to those I am called to serve. I have always carried this burden of a notion that the well-being of everyone and everything (my divorced parents; my alcoholic father; every problem I met) had to rest on me. But this new injection of life of spiritual childhood teaches me rely on God in faith instead of to surrender to the deceptively self-centered notion of "service" in picking up all the slack for other people's lives. The devil does not try to pull Christians off course by tempting with blatant mortal sin nearly as much as with good pushed to compulsive excess and done for the wrong reasons.

And I'm leaving that junk behind. There is so much peace without it.