Three Prayers

Prayer for the Spirit of Work

Glorious St. Joseph,
model of all who pass their life in labor,
obtain for me the grace to work in a spirit of penance
to atone for my many sins;
to work conscientiously,
putting the call of duty above my own inclinations;
to work with gratitude and joy,
considering it an honor to use and develop by my labor
the gifts I have received from God;
to work with order, peace, moderation, and patience,
without ever recoiling before weariness or difficulties.
Pray for me that I might, above all, with purity of intention
and with detachment from self,
having always before my eyes the hour of death
and the accounting which I must render
of time lost, talents wasted, good omitted,
and vain complacency in success,
which is so fatal to the work of God.
All for Jesus,
all for Mary,
all after your example,
O Patriarch Joseph!
This shall be my watchword in life and in death.
Amen.


Prayer to Deliver from Doubt

Lord, I have proven to myself, over and over, that I am untrustworthy.
And Lord, You have proven to me, over and over, that You are most trustworthy.
When I walk in Your ways, I see, I hear, I understand, I am washed in Light.
When I wander from You, I stumble, I moan, my soul writhes in darkness.
Jesus, deliver me from doubt.
Give me the grace every moment to fly to Your merciful embrace
Where I wish to remain for always. Amen.



Prayer for Vigilance

If today I am to be tested, O Lord,
Help me to be ready to fight for You,
To die for You,
To lay it all on the line for You. Amen.

Scattershot

Before my laptop died twice this summer, I had a little software app that was good for journaling. I used it mainly to record notes and quotes. Luckily I printed out a copy before the crashing commenced. Following is a selection of these tidbits and gems that I would like to remember:



The world is inclined to worship the trivial and trivialize the sacred.

If you don't know God's story, you don't know your story. Because you are in God's story.

"Life is dour combat, to use the words of the Catechism, and we should wage war against sin like we intend to win." - Father Corapi

Beware the tolerance of evil for the sake of keeping peace.

God gives us a hunger for Him and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. It's not meaningless. It points to a real need that can and must be met.

The cross of Christ is true love. We must love like this.

In humility, behold mystery.

"Far be it from us to disobey God to obey man." - St. Paul

"Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." - G.K. Chesterton

"The world offers you comfort but you weren't made for comfort, you were made for greatness and Jesus Christ calls you to greatness." - Pope Benedict XVI, in his first papal address.

"Science is the study of measurable things. Religion is the study of incomprehensible and mysterious things that are revealed." - Father Benedict Groeschel

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it's been found difficult and left untried." - G.K. Chesterton

"We are not called to be successful, we are called to be faithful." - Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

God is Love

Praying the rosary today, I was contemplating the fact that God is love. I have often marveled that we know from divine revelation that the Almighty is three persons in one God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The blessed Trinity is an eternal exchange of love. A community of love into which we are called to enter.

Today something else occurred to me. Jesus Christ is live-giving love. (By His love and through his love we are saved from death, reborn into new life.) He shows us what it means to give one's self in love: total sacrifice. Christ is the model for this. We must contemplate His sufferings and death in order to learn how to suffer, even die, for others.

Mary is the model for receiving the divine gift of sacrificial life. Her existence is a resounding "Yes" to Jesus. She shows us how to accept the new life that is given to us as well as every pain, suffering and trial that goes with it. She is the model for receiving love. We must contemplate her mothering of the divine child in order to learn how to receive others, their love and their sufferings for us.

Just as we look to Jesus for life, imitating His sacrificial love in a way that can be truly life-giving to others in that it points them to Jesus, we should gaze on Mary for the supreme example of how to be loved. How to accept love from others, humbly, bear it as a woman bears a child in her womb, bring it to term in our hearts and ultimately offer it back to God in thanksgiving.

To crudely summarize, I think love comes in three "gears":

Forward - giving - sacrificial - Christic
Reverse - receiving - humble - Marian
Neutral - abiding

A few pedestrian examples:

Forward - Your spouse has an opportunity to go to a Bible Study. It means you will have to watch the kids instead of going to the gym as you had planned. This small sacrifice helps your spouse do something good and draw closer to God. You have to give something up but if you do it in love, without resisting, you gain peace and joy as you draw closer to Christ.

Reverse - You are throwing a party and you're feeling overwhelmed with all of the preparations. Guests are asking if they can bring anything. You swallow your pride and say yes. They want to help out of love. You let them. Letting go of the image of perfection, you draw closer to the One who is perfect and you enable others to sacrifice in love for you.

Neutral - You go to a party neither spiritually leaning forward, in expectation of helping everyone there, proving you are a good, loving Christian, nor leaning backward, waiting for others to "embrace" you. You abide. Perhaps one moment you will help another and the next another will help you. (By "help" I mean here to offer up an act of love, a sacrifice.) You shift gears as needed.

This is my thinking in a nutshell. The hard part, as always, is moving beyond contemplation and living it out.

Detachment - Part 5 ("Drying Up Joy")

"Contrary to what the world thinks, attachments are killjoys. The worldly man and woman take it for granted that the more they can multiply experiences and accumulate possesions, the more they shall be filled with contentment. They so want to believe this that they will discount a constant stream of evidences to the contrary. Boredom at parties, hangovers after bouts of drinking, heartburn after overeating, aftereffects of drug abuse, emptiness after loveless sexual encounters and failure to find fulfillment in fine fashions or in expensive excursions make it abundantly clear that sense pleasures are not joy. No matter how intense they may be for the moment, they invariably leave in their wake a vacuous disillusionment. Where one does find joy is in the heart and on the lips of those who have generously given up all else to have Christ."

Detachment - Part 4 ("An Affront to God")

"Given that God is endless Beauty and Joy and Love, seeking anything aside from Him and for its own sake is pure nonsense. Preferring something finite to God is an insult to Him. 'He who loves something together with God,' says our Saint, 'undoubtedly makes little of God, for he weighs in the balance with God an object far distant from God'... The principle here is readily seen even on the human level. A husband who prefers his bowling to his wife insults her, and a wife who chooses her own vanity or comfort to her husband's well-being insults him. Immeasurably more demeaning is the preference for a finite frill to purest Love."

Detachment - Part 3 ("Impediments to Prayer and Awareness of God")

"Each of us is sinner enough to know well from experience that a selfish clinging focuses our attention on ourself and draws us away from the divine presence. It prevents us from preferring what is more pleasing to God instead of our own pleasure. Many, perhaps most, of the distractions we suffer in prayer are due to those disordered concerns and desires."

Detachment - Part 2 ("Sinful ramifications")

"One might reflect on how, for example, an attachment to television or to clothing brings about any number of faults, faults that St. John of the Cross enumerates... judging others badly... waste of time... envy... avarice... vanity... fear of what should not be feared... a loss of taste for the Eucharist... forgetfulness of God... gossiping... neglect of work."

In other words, there's a domino effect to sin. Out of curiosity, you just barely nudge that first sin and - watch out - all related sins are toppling fast...

Detachment - Part 1 (Intro and "The dimming of vision")

These days I'm reading Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel - On Prayer, a radically challenging book calling us to truly live out the gospel as did Saints John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.

Fr. Thomas Dubay tells of how God wants to give us joy and peace beyond imagining. Yet this joy and peace comes only when we are stripped bare, when we are suffering, carrying our cross, dying to ourselves. Once we are emptied, God fills us.

But how can we come to know this joy and peace? Through union with God. Not only in heaven but also on earth. The saints say as much. The Bible and the Catholic Church affirm it.

Union, transforming union, happens in prayer. So I must learn to pray, really pray, even to pray always. To make my life itself a prayer. This is a real challenge for me. I pray the rosary. I pray at meals. I pray at bedtime. But I don't often contemplate. I don't often ask for specific guidance. My prayer life is lacking and I've got to do something about it!

It's uncomfortable seeing the failings of my prayer life thrown into relief by the example of the saints. On the other hand, I don't want to be tempted into comparing myself to "the average" and supposing myself to be doing better.

I must humbly admit that I'm having difficulty trying to detach myself from certain things, especially coffee, coke, sugary and salty foods and second helpings.

That said, here are the pitfalls of a worldly life as enumerated by Fr. Dubay, and a quote or two in counterpoint to each, calling us to detachment:
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"The human person is destined to this complete oneness of likeness with God, a oneness effected through total love that transforms the human partner into divine splendor: 'From one glory to another we are transformed into the image that we reflect', as St. Paul puts it (2 Cor 3:18). This union of likeness effected by perfect love can happen only when everything unlike and unconformed to God is cast out, for otherwise the entire image cannot be received into the soul. Therefore, says John, we must become purified of anything ungodly with no admixture of imperfection.



"St. John of the Cross details this basic rationale for detachment with an analysis of the specific harms that selfish clingings, even small inordinate ones, introduce into the soul's pursuit of the Lord... What are these harms?

1. The dimming of vision. "St. John observes that the human intellect is befogged in its natural capacity and in receiving supernatural wisdom when it clings to finite things for their own sakes. So, says John, our unredeemed desires are like a cataract over the eyes, a truth that any experienced spiritual director can verify. People who are singlemindedly and wholeheartedly pursuing God immediately understand the finer points of evangelical perfection, while equally intelligent but worldly men and women simply cannot comprehend an identical explanation. This is one reason why five hundred people listening to a Sunday homily have such diverse reactions to it, ranging from an eager enthusiasm through bland indifference to hostile rejection."

Why so humble?

People often ask me, how do you do it? How do you maintain such a high level of humility?

Well, that's what this blog is all about! Over the course of however many posts I can muster, I will share my many secrets...

Actually, humility is the goal. Adding "most" before "humble" will, I hope, remind me to watch out for that ever-present shadow: spiritual pride. I don't ever want to think, "Hey, I'm getting good at this humility thing!"