As the years go by I choose Lenten disciplines which are less and less ambitious.
I think this is funny, because early on I assumed that I would get better and better at deciding to resist a desire in the moment; at keeping track of my planned sacrifices day by day; at remembering we are in a season of self-discipline at all.
Remarkably, this has not happened. I am no better at practicing Lent now than I was thirty years ago as a beginner. Maybe I am just lazy. Or maybe I've learned something.
I can't tell you whether it is smart or not to keep starting over at very low levels. It might be something that is smart for me and wouldn't be smart for other people. But I've noticed a theme in the past few years:
It turns out that I am less able than I realized to make things happen the way I want them to.
It turns out that when things don't happen in accord with my expectations, when we can't meet expectations—when I pile more expectations (on myself or others) to catch up, well, that doesn't actually force us back onto the track I imagined.
I've been dropping a lot of expectations. I still wake up each day, drink my coffee, and wait for the caffeine to kick in with that lovely feeling that I can accomplish my plans. But the plans for the day are growing sketchier all the time, and leaving more room for surprise; and I am reframing disappointment as discovery.
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So my Lenten discipline, other than a few extremely minor practices that are not so much sacrifices as variations that mark the season,* is to read through the thirty-eight very short and approachable Catecheses on Prayer from the Wednesday papal audiences beginning May 6, 2020.
(That link goes to vatican-dot-va, in case you would like to follow a penitential path; in all these years they have never added a "forward" button that lets you read Wednesday audiences in order. A more useful link is this roundup from Irish Papist which links to all the addresses in numerical order.)
And, should my youngest child stay in bed long enough to afford me extra silence, to pray a rosary or at least as many of the decades as I have time for. Because the flesh motivates the spirit, it's actually helping that splurged on a lovely new rosary from Iron Lace Designs this year, one that's absolutely a pleasure to hold and fiddle with.
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Anyway, today I read the thirteenth catechesis: "Jesus, Teacher of Prayer."
During his public life, Jesus constantly availed himself of the power of prayer. The Gospels show this to us when he retired to secluded places to pray. These are sober and discreet observations that allow us only to imagine those prayerful dialogues. They clearly demonstrate, however, that even at times of greater dedication to the poor and the sick, Jesus never neglected his intimate dialogue with the Father. The more he was immersed in the needs of the people, the more he felt the need to repose in the Trinitarian Communion, to return to the Father and the Spirit.
...The Catechism states that “when Jesus prays he is already teaching us how to pray” (no. 2607). Therefore, from Jesus’ example we can derive some characteristics of Christian prayer.
There are several characteristics, and I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I found myself focusing on this one:
Another characteristic of Jesus’ prayer is solitude. Those who pray do not escape from the world, but prefer deserted places. There, in silence, many voices can emerge that we hide in our innermost selves: the most repressed desires, the truths that we insist on suffocating, and so on. And, above all, in silence God speaks. Every person needs a space for him or herself, somewhere to cultivate their interior life, where actions find meaning again. Without an interior life we become superficial, agitated, and anxious — how anxiety harms us! This is why we must turn to prayer; without an interior life we flee from reality, and we also flee from ourselves, we are men and women always on the run.
I sometimes (who am I kidding—it's all the time) don't manage to get any serious morning prayer in, because the kids wake up too soon, or whatever, and I don't get any morning time alone with my coffee. Obviously I could make more of an effort to make that alone time later in the day, but let's not pretend it isn't a bit of a handicap! Seeking solitude, having trouble finding the space for prayer when you're surrounded by people, is normal and healthy. If you never get that alone time, you are probably going to have to resort to other types of prayer: communal prayers in the family, which I've never got the hang of except in scripted situations like mealtime grace; ejaculatory prayers, those tiny interior spaces we find between the moments of our day, I find, are more nourishing.
Anyway, this helped me feel less like there is something wrong with me that I feel I can't quite do it right without solitude. And it led me to think it would be interesting to go over the Gospels and compare two types of passages: those where Jesus disappears into solitude to pray, and those where Jesus prays out loud in front of everybody so they can hear. I wonder what can be learned from the conditions which surround those two different modes.
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In the first decade of my rosary, the mystery of the resurrection, I was still thinking about plans and how plans don't work out the way we expect them to. And I thought about how the individual resurrection is, we assume, the start for all of us of really actually living out the plan God has for us. Hmm, I thought, a lot of people say things like "God has a plan for your life," but... I guess we don't really know that?
(h/t for the meme to this great post by Amy Welborn)
God has a plan for everybody's resurrection and eternity. Assuming we find ourselves still on board with the plan upon death, we'll be living that plan ever after. Because our wills will be fully aligned with his, et cetera.
And of course, we believe in a "divine plan" that broadly encompasses the whole of creation, an engine that gets us there, supplied with enough grace to drive us whenever we choose to tap into it.
But I'm inclined to think that, free will being what it is, there may be no individualized plan for our lives at all. At least not a "plan" that resembles the kind of things that humans make and call plans in any way. It may be actively harmful to think of "a plan" that God has for my life, as it admits of the possibility of failing so badly that I cannot keep up with it or ever catch up at all. It also, I think, devalues the role of will and discernment as images of God: discernment isn't, I think, a kind of decipherment, where we try to read exactly the itemized steps that God has determined are best for us. It's a kind of creativity, of problem solving; cooperation.
The idea of an individual plan for my life is, I think, maybe a bit of an accretion? We have a perfectly good and much more open-ended model, instead, in the idea of vocation. I think it will be healthier, at least for me, to put listening first, and then apply prudence as needed.
Plans are not bad! They are good! Well, they can be, anyway. But let's accept that we don't have to figure out the divine plan, in whole or in part. We can make normal fallible human plans, for my life, for my year, for my morning; and we can plan to be flexible. Listening, learning, adjusting, getting closer to alignment, solving problems as they come up, creatively.
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* I mean. I like eating fish or chickpea curry a lot. I like my tea without milk just about as much as I like it with milk, too. Milkless tea is Lenten tea, it's not sacrificial tea. I don't know, it still seems like a good idea. I should find more of these little practices.
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