Fr. Iain, the Carmelite who teaches me so much, says that St. John of the Cross teaches us that the point witin us to delve in to prayer (presuming we already have the prayer relationship open and active) should be our point of felt need. Something like that.
Today what I feel is my aching body. I'm only 54 years old, and even as I type that I can hardly believe it. I feel like when I turn 55 this year, there's just no turning back! I feel young on the inside and still very connected to my early adulthood, at least in the good ways. But, the reality is, I'm getting old, just like my Mom did, just like my grandma did, and just like my ancestors before her who died before I was born. This way I too shall go.
Aging is teaching me something about cooperation, though. I mean in the sense of St. Paul's analogy of the Church being the Body of Christ. And this does actually fit in to my own Lenten meditation I have going.
Lately I've been doing physical therapy, and while I'll spare you all the gory details, this process has taught me the price of one part of the body chronically doing the work of another part, or shielding parts from fully doing what they are meant to do. It has been fascinating to me to experience that as I stretch some bits, use other bits more reliably, protect the right bits and work the other right bits -- that all of this is also freeing emotionally and mentally, not just physically.
Yesterday I was hinting around at how I love to do hard work for the sake of hard work, and I can feel good about my capacity to work (even if it is intellectual, or what have you). Here's a think I've learned: I have believed that exercise is good if it is hard, and that is not always true, because you can sweat and strain with bad form, and really do your body some injury. Effort is not queen. Effort must be united with good form, and good form is actually more important than hard effort.
I'm not entirely sure that in normal parish life we have either good form or hard effort. I rather fear that we have a lot of couch potatoes who feel a strain to do normal daily things that should flow from us much more freely. There's a mountain that could be said there, but that's not really my point.
In me, I have been catching myself acting with a kind of habitual anxiety that has been a culprit in my spiritual life and definitely the main culprit with my physical difficulties. One of the demonic refrains in my life since childhood has been that the best thing I could do for the sake of humanity is to shut up and go away. Now, I've wrestled down the large boulders of that lie, but vestiges, echos, of this lie still attack as temptation. It can show up in my love of efficiency: move along, get out of the way, think fast, no stalling, chop chop. This can meld into acting like there is no love for me, no one will be patient, no one will embrace me just for being me. And it leads me to interior anxiety if I have a misstep or waste ten seconds.
If I am in touch with the presence of God and am held in his patience with me, and am responding to his eyes on me, then I will be less likely to crush myself with this kind of interior anxiety. And the more I let it go, the more peace will become habitual. But I have to become aware when these pains spark up, and respond to them differently.
So, another shift here. What strikes me is how important it is, not just within my own body to let go of anxiety and replace it with peace and to function in that, but how important it is for every member of the Body of Christ to peacefully be their part. When one part of the body is at peace and freedom, it will release others. Still others will hurt and crab more. But no one should embrace lies in order to silence the hurt and crab of another. The one with the hurt and crab has to respond to the Lord, too. I can't do anything to make another person change, but I do believe I can do something to make people want to change. And most of the time it does not happen because I lecture someone, but because someone observes something in me while I'm not even aware of it. I did my first week of prescribed leg exercises, and then ohhhh I wanted to sit with criss-cross legs and it felt soooo good.
Christians are called to be people of continual conversion, who live daily in the presence of God, who bear witness to Him with us by the faith, hope, and charity we exercise in our interactions. There is movement, dynamism, inherent in this life. Something is always new, always moving.
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