Updates

This old blog continues to slow down. Maybe it's over after eight (!) years. It's never really had a plan; I just wrote things as they occurred to me and since the Holy Spirit let me know that he was using it for my salvation and occasionally for the salvation of others, I was happy to continue.

But since it has been a while since I last wrote, I thought I would post some updates.

It's also the Second Sunday of Lent, a day dear to me on a couple of levels. The readings today are so rich; there's a sense of the first light before the dawn of a glorious blessing. Divine blessing promised for all the families of the earth through God's call to one man, Abram. The brilliance of the glorified Body of the incarnate Son revealed to the inner circle within the inner circle of Jesus' disciples. It's all what Paul calls the "grace bestowed...before time began."

There's your homily for today, the short version I suspect.

Prayer is good. There is something new in it, but I'm not sure how to name it. Some new level or call or surrender to the action of grace, I'm not sure how to describe it. There's also a new sense of what my priesthood means for prayer now that I'm living a more hidden life, as I pray for people especially in their suffering.

Spiritual reading is good too. I have the good fortune at the current moment to live under the same roof as the Capuchin Central Library. I've been reading volumes of the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series that I've always wanted to get to but never have. So far I've read Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Richard Rolle. I was especially grateful for Tauler; one of those books for spiritual reading that Providence sends just at the right time. There's something eerily modern about him in the way he speaks about prayer as a descent, a going deeper, a sinking into one's 'ground,' rather than solely as an ascent.

For Lent I'm doing a couple of simple things in the hopes that they will help me surrender to the grace of renewing my baptismal promises come Easter. One is a funny kind of non-standard fast that I have thought of before but never tried. It's going well so far. The other is a little adjustment in how I use the evening meditation period, something to keep me focused on the basics.

So that's what I'm up to and that's it for now. Thanks for your prayers, as I pray for you.