Sunday October 27, 2024
Mark 10: 46-52
The scary tedium and emptiness of trying to live a life of prayer. The return, of course, of all your habits, bad and otherwise. How hard it is to wake up when the alarm goes off. Reading the NYT on the toilet. All day the sense of having failed at some duty.
But there is no duty. There is no way. To live a life of prayer is live a life.
It’s easy to feel that calling your life “a life of prayer” or a “contemplative life” is to dignify it or to be pretentious, holier-than-thou, but that’s to misunderstand the ordinariness of prayer.
It’s to misunderstand the Incarnation: God is here, now. In him all things continue into being.
We can’t think about God all the time. God isn’t something we can think about because God isn’t something. God is force, energy, person, the general and the particular, love and detachment, silence and speech, so deeply interfused that we can’t know him except fleetingly or cumulatively, the way we can’t see the air we breathe except from orbit, where the thin layer of the atmosphere becomes obvious. Or God is the light of the sun that allows us to see, and each ray, each particle and wave, is meant for me in particular, and for you. Is intended. Day and night. The planet turning. Day after day after day. Breathe in. Breath out. Jes-us. Jes-us. Have mercy on us.
Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!