+ Prayer from the Midst of Unavoidable Busy-ness
Every moment with You seems like a moment stolen right now. Here, leaning against the clothes dryer, waiting for the next load to finish, stealing a moment to focus my thoughts on You, I look up at the sky (such a small patch from here) and wish I could continue my hermeneutics of clouds, philology of birdsong… Just sit and BE and take You in.
It seems that I cannot carve out a slice of solitude for us that is long enough for me to feel connected and recollected, but it’s okay. We both know. Life is like that sometimes. This lack of space and silence is teaching me that my life IS my prayer – not just an offering to You, not just lived with You by my side, but lived in complete union with You, in union with the Mass, in union with Your perpetual prayer. If I allow You to truly live in me, in my daily mundanities and exigencies, my life is prayer.
Because for all the profound mystery that You are, Your love for us drove You to enter our world in flesh and bone, live in our domesticities, toil in our dust. You redeemed our very nature and the nature of every mundane activity in which we engage by partaking of every bit of it as Emmanuel.
And You continue to be present as the fire in our flesh, the meaning in our mundanities. Not merely the ideal man to imitate, an idea to strive for, a symbol for our struggle, or a superficial covering over the things we’d rather not face – You are fully present, truly here in the events of every day, in the souls that hurt us or bring us joy, in the pangs of conscience or the consolations we experience, in the labors and celebrations and routines and challenges that make up our life, in the creations and destructions of the world. So if I live my life for You, live fully for You, my life can be prayer.
Time for my own prayer and silence is necessary too, and You will help me carve out that time soon I trust; but in the interim I have no choice but to make each moment the best prayer it can be (sometimes praise, sometimes petition, always thanks, all with love) and accept this as Your will for me right now. Yes, Jesus.
