Fourth Sunday in Lent
Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down
from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world:
Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in
him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God, now and for ever. Amen.

I love food and I love to cook. Bread is something that I don't bake much because of the time that it takes but that I'm hoping to make more and more in my new lifestyle. I've always loved the process of baking bread...the feel of the dough as you mix it...it's living elasticity in the kneading process...the light an airy texture after the first rise and the way it deflates gently like a hot air balloon when you punch it down. And the smell when it bakes takes me back to early morning communion Sundays in my UCC church, when my mother would bake the symbolic loaf that would sit on the altar along with the cup of grape juice, while the congregation itself got little tiny glasses of juice and cubes of wonder bread. I knew that the real loaf was destined for our dinner table after church...along with the left over grape juice.

My images of bread are not, I'm sure, the images of the first Christians. Not for them the white, pale, and almost tasteless commercial product which passes for bread for most of us. Certainly bread in biblical times was not white. At best it was nutty and full of stone ground kernels of ancient wheat...perhaps more like Spelt than our modern versions. Barley might have been the flour...or perhaps even ancient grains like kamut or emmer... and either leavened or unleavened. Matzhot was probably not used...as, like much of the current Jewish Seder it's origins are in the diaspora. Whatever it's actual appearance or ingredients, it is clear that this simple food is of immense import to Jesus. The images of bread abound all over the Bible...from the manna in the wilderness of the Pentateuch to the loaves and fishes of Christ's miracles...and finally of course the Eucharistic meal.

Bread it fascinating to me. Unless it is unleavened, bread is a living thing until it is baked. The leaven itself is deeply suggestive. A small amount transforms grains that could remain dense and almost inedible into a magnificent light and airy substance. No wonder Christ compares leaven to the Kingdom of Heaven...both have pretty remarkable transformational properties. The other thing is that the process takes a while. Yeast as you first see it is as dead looking as anything could be. Soaking it in warm water wakes it up but it takes a couple of hours to perform it's magic on a loaf of bread. It resonates symbolically with so much in Christianity. The "dead" yeast rising again...in fact we speak of the rising loaf almost as if it took is coming back to life. And yeast also functions as spirit does to us...taking the dead matter of our bodies and enlivening it with a mysterious force. Some days I can almost feel my spirit working on my in just this manner.

So it is no wonder that Jesus, and other biblical figures stress bread as a symbol so much. It is a potent but everyday object. However, as our collect makes clear, Jesus' identity as bread is quite different from our every day loaves.

This collect marks the turning point in Lent. There is a distinct lightening of the mood in the readings for this Sunday, which, though they are still focused on repentance, are much more infused with God's mercy. And this collect itself is more focused on the positive side of God than the other side. We ask that Jesus come down and be the true bread from heaven. This bread is what is meant by "daily bread' in the Lord's Prayer. It is the visitation of Christ to us. Most concretely it happens in the Eucharist, where we ask Christ to become bread for us...and indeed in this collect you can hear some resonances of Eucharistic theology. But sacraments are just a visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, and as meaningful as they are, they only point to the moon...they are not the moon itself.

I am a Eucharistic Christian. I'm Anglican precisely because of the power of Eucharistic experiences I've had. And yet...as powerful as the sacrament is, I'm aware that my relationship with God is not contained only in that moment. Christ is present eucharistically present in more than just the bread and wine. He is present in the prayerful reading of scripture, in prayer itself, and in every person we meet. Teilhard de Chardin in his brilliant and beautiful meditation, The Mass of the World even proposes that Christ is eucharistically present in Nature...not that God is nature, but that in some deep and mysterious way, God fills nature, much as he fills the bread and wine in communion.

People get scared of this thinking. It smacks of pantheism to some...panenthienism to others. But Christianity, at least as held by the early Church, is panentheist. Church fathers talk of the spirit filling all things...St. Augustine speaks of God being closer to us than our own breath. And the book of John is full of those identity images...I am the Vine, you are the Branches....Abide in me....be one as I and the Father are one. And this version of panenthienism is acknowledged in our collect as well. We feed on Christ "in our hearts by faith" in the beautiful words of the Eucharistic Prayer, so that he may live in us and we in him. We do not actually become God in any of these communions...Christianity is pretty explicit about that (and honestly I don't want to be God...too much responsibility and I'm way too imperfect). But in some mysterious way Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, lives in us...leavens us...rises us as bread dough rises...until we are transformed from the beings we are to the beings we were meant to be...or at least closer. I don't think this transformation ever ends in our lifetimes.

Remember the saying...you are what you eat. Jesus means it literally I think....bon appetite.

Third Sunday in Lent
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves
to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and
inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all
adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil
thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It is quite appropriate actually that this collect comes at the mid point of Lent. The new disciplines are beginning to loose their luster. Those of us who fast are beginning to tire of whatever we are eating. The pull of the things we may have "given up" is beginning to reassert itself. I know for myself, I really just want to veg in front of the TV with some Mac and Cheese and maybe some Fried Chicken (my desert island food of choice). And the weather...it's not cold and snowy, but yet it's not warm enough to be beautiful. Especially in a late March Easter, the Lenten season really can be pretty bleak.

This collect acknowledges the realities of our situation. For in the opening we realize that we are actually powerless...that we cannot help ourselves. As we are, we are a mass of contradictory impulses, some of which want one thing and some which want the polar opposite. Ask anyone who has suffered with overweight or alcoholism. We are unable to conquer our demons with will power. Most of us don't really even have a single will which can make the attempt. One minute we want to diet, the next we want cake. One minute we feel the deep hurt of those around us who have been hurt by our alcoholism and sincerely want to make amends; the next we are on a binge. Or more mundanely, one moment we want to be channels of grace to all we know; the next we are damning our boss to hell, or dreaming about how to revenge ourselves on our meddlesome co-worker.

One thing that I believe that I know unequivocally, is that everyone is in this position, from the most holy monk down to the homeless drug addict. The degree may be different, but without outside help, all of us are a morass of competing little personalities. Like the demoniac we are possessed by a Legion of personalities, each one thinking it's the "king" of our souls and turning our psyches into a cacophony of competing voices and thoughts. That we don't notice it much is thanks to our unique ability to delude ourselves...to be literally "asleep" to our own inner chatter and contradictory behavior.

So the solution is this...since we have no power in ourselves, we have to attach ourselves to another power...one that does have the ability to help. The joy of God and grace is that it is always available, and there is a power there that we can access and that is greater than anything that we can achieve. We just have to recognize that we need the help and ask for it. In fact...in the moment we literally "wake" up...or come to ourselves as the phrase is related in the parable of the Prodigal Song...there is an amazing rush of power...not a power we can control...or a power we deserve. It is God stepping in the breach...functioning as a "shield and buckler".

And indeed that is how the collect continues. We ask God for defense from adversity....but more importantly for protection from "evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul." This turn of phrase interests me. So often we think of these little "temptation" thoughts as harmless. And actually, coming from a place of Divine Power they are totally harmless. But without that power and self-knowledge thoughts indeed do matter and are deeply harmful. Every sin that can be committed begins as a thought or emotional impulse, which to me is also a thought. We cannot commit an evil act if we cannot conceive of it. So in the very conception lies the seeds of our destruction. And if we tell ourselves that these thoughts are harmless we give them more power.

I recently was diagnosed as a diabetic. It didn't come as a big shock to me but it has been an adjustment. Mostly I am taking the lifestyle changes as spiritual as well as physical challenges. But the food thing is a real struggle sometimes. I'm quite in love with good food...especially good Southern food, which of course is diabetes in a can. The seriousness of my health issues make it no joke anymore to follow a diet. But I can say that, especially late at night, I live in a pretty constant state of temptation. Thoughts of sweets dance through my head...and even thoughts of binging on "legal" food like All Bran. Since diabetes is controlled as much by how much you eat as what you eat...and I need to slim down seriously...even legal binges are pretty devastating to my blood sugar.

In earlier times these kinds of thoughts might develop strength. As I entertain them more and more they begin to get stronger...moving from fleeting images of food to little internal monologues about the innocuous nature of the impending binge. Then earnest thoughts about how I have to go downstairs to take out the trash...and before you know it I've eaten half an apple pie. But such binges are no longer an option for me.

I've decided this time that I'm really totally powerless over these little thoughts, and that they are actually evil. They may originate in all sorts of psychological states, but in actual practice they function exactly like the demons in the Temptation of St. Anthony....or like the Daughters of Maya in the story of the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. And evil is not too strong a word for them....for their aim is evil; it's too tempt me back into familiar patterns and habits, patterns and habits that have proved self-destructive and could eventually prove deadly. I have to call them out as I see them. This is in a sense the "spiritual warfare" that so many of our Evangelical brothers and sisters talk about...and they have a point.

So this collect is an especially powerful one for me. It is one that I think I will pray with regularity, even after this week is done. Because the only really help I can ask for comes from God. God can give me the strength to ignore the voices of temptation. Indeed, when I pray...especially when I do centering prayer...I have an opportunity to let go of those voices. Contrary to popular opinion and the voices of some religious conservatives, Contemplative prayer does not make your mind a blank. In fact there are thoughts going through your mind all the time as you pray. But the beauty of Centering Prayer for me is that it helps me learn how to lay aside those thoughts. By learning how to effortlessly let them in and out of my mind I learn that they can have no power over me...and that when I am sitting with my God I am safe from them. It is not my own effort at work here. God quite literally wraps me up in Godself and those little evil voices turn into a quiet murmur. "I" don't think about them anymore because "I" am doing something much more beautiful and interesting.

So indeed, there is an answer...and that answer is Biblical. You cast your burdens on God and on Jesus. It sounds "old time religion" of me, but it's true. God will take is all up. He won't fix all your problems. God still wants us to grow and develop and that growth can only happen as we struggle with our own demons. But God doesn't give us more than we can handle. As St. Paul assures us in this week's Epistle lesson, God will not let us be tempted beyond our strength...and with the temptations He provides us with the means of escape. And that escape is the Cross of Christ.

Second Sunday in Lent
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious
to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them
again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and
hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ
your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

"If the first Sunday in Lent is about temptation then the second is about the call to faith." That is how I began my last blog post about this collect. And re-reading it I think that it is true. This Sunday is about Abraham and his righteousness in both Old Testament and Epistle readings. We see Abraham move his family on the promise of an unseen God. We see him trust in the rather ridiculous promise from a worldly standpoint that he and his barren wife would have children. And we see his willingness to sacrifice that same son without question to a God who seems cruel and capricious. And parallels are drawn between Abraham and Jesus...Jesus as the perfection of that sacrificial attitude. Jesus, willing to go to an even darker place than Abraham...to the gates of Hell itself. Clearly this "unchangeable truth" isn't something easy or always pleasant.

But I think what interests me this time around in this collect is the first petition. Be gracious....That phrase has such medieval connotations now. Kings are gracious. Ladies are gracious. You can have gracious manners. But the collect is aiming at something much deeper than that. For in the wording is an understanding that we do indeed have no power in ourselves to remain steady on our path. We may have the best intentions in the world but those intentions curl around on themselves so easily and we find ourselves doing the very thing we vowed not to do. We have "undulations" in C. S. Lewis's phrase from The Screwtape Letters. We have spiritual mood swings that make it nearly impossible for us to stay on the unbelievably demanding course that God asks of us. The situation would be completely hopeless is not for Grace. Because at the time we need it, help is always available. It's only a breath away, if we only open ourselves to it.

Grace is an utterly mysterious and equally utterly palpable force in our lives. I am more and more convinced that absolutely nothing in my life comes to me but for it. It's hard to remember this in the moment. When I have a really good class with my students I can inwardly crow about what a gifted teacher I am...but those gifts are just that...gifts. Such as I have, they are not mine but rather bestowed on my by my God. Indeed, one of the things that we discover if we try contemplative prayer is how rare true contemplation is...and how mysteriously bestowed upon us it is. And yet Grace is around us....ever present. We are literally swimming in a sea of Grace, in which God is continually bathing us. If we can get outside ourselves and the circumstances of our day to day lives we can see this. But for most of this it is hard to live like this continually. I know for myself, the best I can get is to feel blest on a sunny morning as I'm walking to work. But let a car fail to yield to me when I'm crossing the street, and all that splendid grace becomes instantly invisible.

The grace of seeing our failings is just as mysterious, even if at the time it feels less beautiful than contemplation or joy. But it is just as much a gift of God. Compunction, the ability to feel the full weight of our sins and of the ways we have failed and strayed from our intentions, and from God's intentions for us, is a grace just as everything else is. It can be deeply painful, seeing ourselves and all of our myriad inner contradictions all at once. The Russian esoteric thinker G.I. Gurdjieff said that without preparation, a man would go mad if he saw all his inner contradictions at once. So we are equipped with inner "buffers" which allow us to function quite well, without real self-knowledge. And when we are ready, appropriate forces from outside give us the strength and ability to see some of these inner contradictions clearly, which allows us the opportunity to amend our lives. I believe that what Gurdjieff was describing was akin to compunction, which can only come about through the grace of God. Left to our own devices, we would never see the shocking totality of our inner landscape and would lull ourselves into a false sense of our own virtuousness. Thank God that we are not left to that and that with Grace, God allows us to grow and mature as people of faith.

 

So yes...this week's collect is a call to radical faith...not faith triumphant or militant, but radical trust. But these is also an acknowledgement that we cannot find this faith, or stick to it, by ourselves. It takes openness to Grace for this to happen. But just as contemplation, or joy or all the good things God gives us are only a breath away...so too with compunction. If we ask...we shall receive. We just need to be prepared to receive what we ask for.

First Sunday in Lent
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be
tempted by Satan; Come quickly to help us who are assaulted
by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of
each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through
Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

So there it is right at the outset...one of the "hard" words for most contemporary liberal Christians. Temptation, like sin and repentance is not particularly popular in our culture. But unlike sin, temptation has been tamed. It's been co opted by Madison Avenue. We are told to "give into temptation" in myriad ads about chocolate, cookies and even fiber bars. Temptation becomes an island in an inane reality show, or an all inclusive resort. It is made to seem such a little thing.

And yet it is given a major place in the gospels. The first two things that all the synoptic gospels agree upon is the Baptism of Jesus by John, and then his successive temptation in the wilderness. Just this sequence suggests how important a concept temptation is. After the glorious decent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus you'd think he'd be ready to begin his ministry in some triumphant gesture. That's what one of us modern people would do. But no...he disappears for forty day, living in the desert without food or drink. And at the end of it he is tempted by the devil.

Here's another hard word for us moderns. The devil doesn't have much truck with us or we with him in the modern world. He seems hopelessly medieval. And yet he represents in the temptation stories so much that we value in modern life. He tempts Jesus with food...physical needs met, then with extravagant gestures or "specialness"...the angels themselves would swoop down and keep him from falling off a high place. And finally, worldly power beyond Jesus' wildest dreams. Father Thomas Keating in his book Invitation to Love likens these three temptations to the major concerns of our False Self...Safety and security (the bread), affection and esteem (jumping from the parapet) and power and control (the kingdoms of the world). So Jesus in these forty days is showing us that it is indeed possible not to give in to our False Selves, and that in resisting these temptations, great or small, we are taking a giant step toward God and the serving of God's purpose in our world.

So temptation isn't a little thing at all...it is the means by which the Devil, who is present in our False Self just as truly as God is present through the Holy Spirit in our True Self. Or at least the Devil uses the False Self system as the earpiece by which he communicates with us. Therefore there are no "little" temptations. C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece The Screwtape Letters depicts Hell as a fiendish bureaucracy in which little demons are constantly barraging us with suggestions which don't seem so bad in themselves but which serve to separate us from God and our fellow humans. This is a very clever but pointed picture of our inner life. The myriad little temptations which we succumb to yank us away from our intention, so that without realizing it, we even end up doing the exact opposite of our original intention.

Scholasticism in the Roman Catholic church has left us with, among other things, a cataloging tendency when it comes to sin...some are venial and some are mortal. I think that the above picture shreds that scholastic tendency. All sin is venial and all sing is moral. Even the most serious sin is venial when sincerely repented of, and even the most trivial sin is mortal when it's accumulation leads us in the opposite direction of our original intention. The situation would be hopeless...except, as the collect suggests, the answer doesn't lie with u.

For God's grace is such that it can bridge the gap that develops between us and God...that space is never less than a breath away. Just turning to God, aware of how powerless we are over our own passions can help restore the balance in our lives. For God ardently wants us back. All we need to do is turn again...as Thomas Keating says to "change the direction in which you are looking for happiness." It is so easy to fall back into old patterns, even though we know that the old patterns have not helped us in the past and hold no hope for our future. God's path is new...and is always new. It is unfamiliar to us, even though we have "known" it from a young age. It is counter cultural and counter psychological, yet to choose it changes everything.

Happiness lies here...we just have to choose it.

Ash Wednesday

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have
made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and
make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily
lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness,
may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission
and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.

Ok...gonna try this again cause I was such an amazing success last time....

Like any good Episcopalian I went to church tonight to get "ashed". It's a tradition in the church that I didn't grow up with but which has become meaningful to me. But holy days like this do seem to bring out the crazies in New York. All of a sudden everyone becomes a preacher. And the hellfire and brimstone sermons become more frequent.

So on the subway home this man was preaching of God's awesome love and the devil's snares. He was confronted by a young woman who wanted to ask him to relax on the devil part. They both got into a shouting match that ended with him calling her Satan's minion and then spitting on her, accompanied by the foulest language possible. She was not innocent either and in fact started the swearing first. It was also obvious that he was pretty unstable and despite the pleas of other passengers she continued to prod and poke at him. It is the kind of incident that is classically New York...and in fact probably one of the things tourists flock to this city to see. One could shake one's head and take a bit of an ironic pose about it and then go on about your business. One could secretly tape it and put it on YouTube...it's the stuff that viral videos are made of.

But for me it was sad...a sad missed opportunity for all involved including myself, to really reflect the endless love and mercy of God. For if we really believe the opening of this Ash Wednesday Collect,. then indeed God hates nothing he has made...street preachers, antagonists, jaded and bemused New Yorkers...then all of the players in this little drama were God's children. And in fact each of them were teaching a message about humility and how difficult it is to for any of us to achieve.

First there is the street preacher. He obviously was a sincere man who had been blessed with a deep conversion experience. He was passionate about the love that he'd found with God and deeply wanted to share it with the subway car...whether or not we asked for it. But his experience of God was limited...and he was deeply attached to it, as it were the whole of God. When confronted by the woman, he could not see past his own viewpoint and ultimately had to turn her into a demon to keep himself together. As he argued with her he kept saying about all the "good he was doing and the media attention he was getting." He was so wrapped up in his own message he forgot to ascribe any of his "good" to God, where all good comes from.

The woman had her own issues. She was obviously fed up with his often obnoxious volume and frequent allusions to the devil. But she was enjoying her role as antagonist too much. Rather then ignoring an obviously unstable person, she kept twisting the knife in father until he broke and spit at her. I was at one point afraid it was going to get really violent.

I kept wondering what would happen if he could just see her as the voice of God for him right there and then...if he could accept that maybe the way she was provoking him was telling him something valuable about himself and his own unresolved issues...his arrogance and lack of humility. Maybe he was telling her something about her own normalcy and lack of passion...and maybe that her complacent certainty was not quite the thing either. And maybe they were telling all of us jaded New Yorkers that there these moments that make us uncomfortable might be the moments where we can find real lessons. Maybe it was a challenge for us not to the players in this drama as Maury characters or reality tv, but rather as Jesus himself, live and in person, right in front of us on the R train.

What does this all have to do with the Ash Wednesday Collect? We, to me these moments of strangers rubbing up against each others corns are moments of missed connection. And missed connection...missed mark is really what sin is. It is are failing to live up to the radical nature of God and the radical message of Jesus. And that message is that God is love and Love is everywhere. And that doesn't just mean those who are easy to love. God is present in the angry, the petulant, the borderline, the mentally unstable...and we almost ALWAYS miss it.

But the good news is that, again, God hates nothing he has made. and that means that in our failure to respond with compassion, we are not condemned, but loved. We can try again, determine to live out the love we profess with our faith...and we will most certainly fail. I know I do time and time again. But the good news is that God doesn't seem to demand that we get it perfect...just that we try, sincerely...that we humble ourselves enough to realize that we are no better than the people whose instability amuses us...or frightens us. The adversary isn't the devil...it's another human being who is just as sad lonely and confused at heart as we are if we are honest. And God loves us both...he doesn't take sides.

So far from being a depressing thing, as this collect looks on the outset, it is actually full of hope...which springs out of it's pretty dark penitent language. And as we start the Lenten Journey, hope can only be a good thing.

Holy Lent to all!

Lent 3

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This is yet another collect that begins with things that I think are hard for modern people to believe...and may have been hard for anyone at any time. The first statement of this collect puts us right in the thick of it. We acknowledge that we have no power to help ourselves. It amounts to a complete realization of our own utter powerlessness. This is something that I think either people just don't believe, as we tend to ascribe all of our accomplishments to our own abilities and worth, forgetting that these abilities come from God in the first place. Or we pay lip service to humility, but really believe that we are the source of all the things that come to us. Our work produces our money...it buys our food...our housing...our possessions.

And this materialism isn't just about material goods. When we help someone else, we feel good about it because WE helped. We imagine the glory goes to us. We even imagine when prayer is answered that somehow it's answered because WE deserve it. Through our efforts in prayer, or the righteousness of our lives we have compelled God to reward us. Even if we intellectually accept the idea that nothing happens without God's gift of grace, secretly we know that we've earned that Grace through our own efforts. This sort of Pelagianism is insidious. It's actually rewarded by our culture and enshrined in the Puritan work ethic, which, though the Puritans certainly believed in Grace, in practice could really make people believe in their innate right to God's reward.

But our collect reminds us that we have absolutely no power...none whatsoever, outside of God to really effect change in our lives. We may want to reform ourselves...change some element of our lives. Without the help of God we will perhaps start out alright, but within a short span of time will already begin sliding back into our old habits and ways of thinking. Left unchecked we may even find ourselves reversing our intentions and quite soon living out a life opposite of the one we resolved on living. As we are we haven't got the energy to break out of our false self on our own. The habits of a lifetime rewind on themselves continually.

The second part of the collect is particularly interesting to me. We ask God to defend us physically from adversity. But then we also ask him to defend our souls from evil thoughts. Again, this part of the collect can sound hopelessly old fashioned to modern people. After all, we are aware that our thoughts are constantly running from one thing to another, and that an angry thought about the person who is blocking the entrance of the subway, or not moving fast enough on an elevator can hardly do us real harm.

The collect reminds us that thoughts do actually matter. The things we think in a sense shape our life...and not just the big things, but especially the little thoughts. You may be the most peaceful person in the world, yet inside your mind you are constantly seething with hostile and angry thoughts about others. It's only a small step to letting out the poison in your brain. You might be as chaste as a nun and yet inside be a mass of lustful thoughts. While idle lustful thoughts are pretty natural, they can lead you to objectify people, which can change the way you react to your fellow creatures. Jesus even alludes to this idea in the famous "lust in your heart" passage. He reminds us that our righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees...a pretty tall order really. Jesus reminds us that it is what is inside that counts, that thoughts really do matter.

Indeed, our personality is shaped by in large by how we think and by the little thought tapes that loop around in our minds over and over again. Thoughts assail our self-image, creating either inflated egoism or poor self-esteem. Depression can be connected to the negative thoughts that run around our heads all the time. Our habits of mind are powerful, and shape our destinies in powerful ways...and the negative habits can indeed truly hurt us.

The problem is how to fight against thoughts. Trying to block them with our wills doesn't work. Modern psychology has shown the negative effects of repression, which hurts the soul as much as the negative thoughts do. It is like trying to hold a lid on the boiling stew of our thoughts...you can only hold it down for so long and then all those thoughts will explode out with renewed vengence. All the "efforts" that we can make with regard to these thoughts will come to naught if we rely on ourselves. This is where God comes in.

One of the joys to me of contemplative prayer is that it is a primer for dealing with afflictive thoughts and emotions. In Centering Prayer we are taught how to deal with thoughts in a way that gives them over quite literally to God. During the period of prayer, we are instructed to resist no thought, retain no thought, react emotionally to no thought and to return to the Sacred word as the symbol of our consent to the presence and action of God in our lives. This to me is the most effective way I've found to break the grip that my negative thoughts can have on me. When I find myself thinking about anything, but especially when I'm thinking about some particularly negative thought, if I can recognize that I'm in the grip of it, not try to block it but at the same time not think about it or let it loop around, detach myself from it emotionally, and then send it away to God through the repeating of my sacred word, the thought loses all it's power and reveals itself to be nothing more than a little blip on the radar screen. Any thought is this in the time of prayer, but even in daily life this is a practice I can do. I find that when I remember to do it, it has tremendous power. It is literally a daily, moment by moment surrendering of my will to God's will.

The Feast of the Annunciation

Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have known the incarnation of your Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his cross and passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

I'll get to this one soon.