A LAY CISTERCIAN IS ALL ABOUT DAILY PRACTICE AND NEVER LOSING HOPE THAT I CAN START ALL OVER AGAIN.

Like the practice of medicine, spirituality is all about profound silence, solitude, work, and prayer in the context of a larger community of believers.

As of this past three years, I have abandoned my human goal of meeting performance criteria and milestones, such as saying the Liturgy of the Hours, doing meditations in Lectio Divina, spending as much time as I am aware of praying for the poor souls in purgatory, in favor of just simply placing myself in the presence of Christ but in those same prayer configurations. I merely changed priorities, going from what I thought was spiritual to totally dying to that notion and just sitting in the upper room of my inner self in silence and solitude and waiting. At first, nothing happened, and the temptation was that I was, as atheists are fond of saying, hallucinating or making up fairy tales.

The essence of waiting is to refocus on the concept expressed by St. Benedict in Chapter 7:10m, where he instructs his monks and followers that the first step in meeting God is humility, specifically “Fear of the Lord.” This idea does not mean I should fear God. However, I do; instead, I realize who I am to the fullest extent of my capacity and then offer that self to the Father through Christ with the power of the Holy Spirit to lift me up to a more transformative reality (capacitas dei). “Seeking first the kingdom of heaven” has intended and unintended consequences associated with it. As I sit there waiting, my human nature craves results. I must be doing something, anything, to be meaningful. Yet, it is only when I abandon that notion of humanity to embrace my adopted self as heir to the kingdom of heaven that I move deeper into the mystery of my humanity.

A reminder: this mystery, which I have placed at the apex of all that I do, is not to say so many Liturgies of the Hours or Lection Divina sessions, although all of that prepares me to grow deeper into the mystery of what it means to be fully human. It does mean that I totally relax all my self-imposed outcomes (peace, love, and humility, to name a few) in priority. Waiting for me is trusting that God is the source of my longing for fulfillment, the love that can quench the thirst of the human heart and truth beyond physical reality and outside of my nature.

If I am honest with myself, I am in the process of becoming an adopted son (daughter) of the Father and will not be fulfilled according to the flow of my nature until that next level of my evolution, for which my whole life since Baptism has been a practice at doing the will of Christ. I try and fail to move my imperfect humanity from my false self (Galatians 5) to my true self as one who knows that I know the power of the Resurrection in how I live out my daily interface with whatever comes my way but, sadly, falls short. The challenge is “picking myself up, dusting myself off, and starting all over again.”

Look at the photo of my attempts and failures. I get to show God my archery hits and misses after I die. Believe me, I constantly plead for mercy and forgiveness but start all over again. One of the great ways I know that God loves humans is by giving us bread for the journey, the Bread of Life, and the ability to make all things new again and again and again. The institutional church is the occasion for my transformation, not an end in itself. Practice makes perfect.

To be continued…

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