The work-life balance can be very challenging in our modern world.  Maybe the boss starts sending us out of town for meetings and we just get accustomed to making our evening screentime our family time for the day.  Maybe we finally get that promotion we always wanted only to have to work from home with our boss quite literally in our bedroom, demanding our nonstop availability.  While our instinct might be to draw a hard boundary between personal time and being on the clock, as the third commandment does, Jesus seems to complicate things when he heals on the Sabbath, claiming that his father is “always working” (which is difficult to deny as babies are born and people die each and every day of the week!).  And, by the way, isn’t cooking for our families and mowing the lawn work?  And, haven’t we all developed meaningful and enduring friendships in the workplace?  Let’s accept the fact that we were made on the sixth and final day of creation which puts us somewhere between a constant storm of worldly activity and the stillness of eternal life.  When we get comfortable with ourselves at this level, we will stop projecting our unrest and, with Jesus, spend our eternity working for the salvation of the world.  Ave Crux, Spes Unica.

When we are young, we stand in front of a mirror and pump iron, excited to see our bodies take shape one popping muscle at a time.  But gradually, after we grow weary of the societal definition of what our bodies should look like, we discover that exercise is intrinsic to our human lives and does not need to be imposed from the outside.  We thus find ourselves walking to the store, shoveling our neighbor’s driveway, stacking boxes in the basement of a soup kitchen, and taking the stairs at work quite happily, without neurotic impulse.  And so it is with prayer.  When we are novices in the spiritual life, we desperately cling to images of holiness that have been imposed upon us from the outside.  We get in the habit of raising our eyes to heaven in imitation of a face we once saw on a holy card.  We carelessly ramble off a daily rosary because somebody once told us we need to be a prayer warrior who fights the good fight.  As time goes on, however, the piety no longer satisfies, we feel the Lord beckoning us, we surrender our spiritual routines, and, perhaps for the first time, we pray.  Let’s exercise our hearts this week by walking with the Lord and not making it more complicated than that. 

Ave Crux, Spes Unica.

Jesus invites us to take the narrow path (Mt 7:13).  He warns that there are alluring alternatives, seemingly wide open trails that will call out to us, promising the good life, but which, in reality, will rob us of our dignity, discard us, and leave us broken on the side of the road (Lk 10:30).  The middle way, rather, is straight and direct.  It is a kind of non-path, the line where heaven and earth, thinking and feeling, spirit and flesh come together.  It is not passable by our own human efforts; we must instead be drawn very carefully, one trusting step at a time, along the way.  The pressure of this path – with nowhere to escape and nothing to clasp onto – is unbearable at first, but we gradually learn that we are being formed and shaped, stripped of our old selves, and Christified, and before we know it, our feet are somehow standing in the gates of Jerusalem (Ps 122:2).  The next time, therefore, we are tempted to lean right or lean left, let’s pause, wait and listen for the Lord to speak into that narrow space between intention and action: “This is the way, walk in it!” (Is 30:21).  Ave Crux, Spes Unica.

Getting sick is some of the best prayer of my life!  Indeed, when we are sick, we do not have the luxury of designing disciplines or undertaking spiritual exercises or practicing mantras.  Rather, we are confronted by the full weight of our creatureliness and, in an instant, we must make an interior choice: depend on the living God or wallow in the psychodrama of our own selves.  This quiet and hidden decision is truly the essence of prayer; the rawness of our humanity desperately presses against some feeling of the transcendent, which is worth more than all of the Hosannas and Hallelujahs that have ever been uttered!  Let’s therefore spend some time this week reflecting on the sickliness of our earthly condition, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears as we are all doing in one way or another.  May such an awareness be motivation for us to get in the habit of being constantly desperate for a health that lasts.  We shall rejoice as our prayer is heard by the one who is constantly sick of seeing us suffer.  Ave Crux, Spes Unica.

My favorite saint of all time is Joan of Arc.  She was a peasant girl whose visions and locutions were not only signs of psychosis by modern psychological standards, but dangerous pitfalls by the measure of the spiritual masters of her own day.  Nevertheless, beneath whatever compromised psychic structure she had been created with was a pure faith in the living God who loved her to her core and constantly called her into communion.  Thus, despite the awkwardness of publicly testifying that God, in the form of an angel, had insisted that she dress as a man and lead armies into battle, Joan just kept trusting all the way to the point of death.  In the process, she utterly embarrassed the expert theologians, monks and clerics, who were so weighed down by their scholastic edifices that they had become blind to the truth of the living God, and inspired myriads of human beings – including famous skeptics such as Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw – to pay attention to that deep truth who confers life even beyond understanding.  Let’s therefore spend some time this week with our favorite saint and look forward to that graced moment when we might thank them in person for their friendship and guidance.  We just may discover, in that place, that myriads of souls have been inspired by our own sincere efforts to live authentically.  Ave Crux, Spes Unica.