Awe For The Journey

The bigger your world is, the more you will be in awe of it. The smaller you let your world get, the more little things will get to you.

In that spirit one of the little practices that helps me a lot is what I've come to call 'awe for the journey.' I cultivate moments when I can be overwhelmed by the journey as a whole. My life as a Christian has been full of surprising turns and misadventures that were only apparent detours. "God leads us, typically by the nose and often in spite of ourselves," said my first priest.

The other day I had one of those wonderful moments of awe for the journey. On Sunday I agreed to offer a Mass at a parish in order to save another friar from having double-booked himself. I got there early enough to spend some time alone in the church. As I prayed Mid-Morning Prayer and looked over the lovely remains of what must have been an impressive Art Deco-ish high altar, I was struck by a parallel. Twenty years ago this summer I was doing the same thing: sitting in new and mysterious churches and looking around, peering into the Mystery for what I thought in my arrogance was the first time. To think of how I got from sitting in the one church to the other over these past twenty years is absolutely overwhelming when I think about it like that.

That's an example of what I mean by taking time to sit with and be grateful for awe for the journey. It protects me from myself in all of the ways the flesh wants me to get worked up and distracted about little things.