And when He had taken leave of them, He went off to the mountain to pray. Mark 6:46
Devotions snippets: St. Augustine said, "Let us hear the Word of God in stillness and perhaps we will then come to understand it." Prayer time gives us an opportunity to be still and hear God's direction for our lives.
Pat's Tidbits: On Wed of each week, my extended family unites in praying the Rosary. While praying the Rosary on the way to work this morning, I felt inspired to encourage our group to have routine prayer time: when we rise each morning (Joe Hourigan tip), before every meal (even in public), periodically throughout the day, and when we go to bed. Periodically throughout the day could include praying at every red light (Jane Hauffe tip), when you hear an ambulance/fire truck (Angi Castle tip), and when someone asks you...do it on the spot (Sr. Francelle tip). Sr. Margarette Mary said to offer up our daily struggles as a prayer offering for an intention. Routinely visiting with God (praising, asking, listening) in prayer leads to a relationship with Him that keeps our faith alive and brings clarity to our role in the Body of Christ. A prayer routine leads us closer to St. Paul's challenge for us to pray unceasingly. Plus, family and friends who pray together...stay together. Needless to say, I was pretty jazzed when I saw today's verse confirming this message (received in prayer) was a prompting of the Holy Spirit!
Here are a few comments from Rich: "I felt inspired to comment about this mornings readings. I heard the preacher say on the radio this morning as I was driving from the gym to work, "Unbelief is the root of all anxiety." I then walked to my office, settled down, and began my readings and the theme continues. "Take courage, it is I, do not be afraid!" (Mark 6:50) Coincidence, ... I think not! I think God is trying to tell me something with the busy semester getting underway. When I find myself stressing about things, that the root of my worries might be that I have some doubt that God will be there for me always. From now on, every time I feel anxiety coming over me that I need to focus on letting go of control and having faith that God is with me." Through Christ Our Lord,PatPhil 4:13*Today's Bible
Readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/today.shtml
*Welcome God into your day by reading Living Faith (http://www.livingfaith.com/) each morning before work (~1 min).
*If you are especially inspired by today's devotion, consider sharing your inspiration with the distro group.
*Consider forwarding this daily Living Faith devotion email to your friends/family or have me add them to the distro list. Let's joyfully live out the Good News and gladly spread it to those around us (Mark 16:15)!
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Greetings in Christ!
I think we’re “plugged in” to the Holy Spirit today…on the way to work today I was contemplating the circumstances of my life and how under the surface I was internalizing a lot of stress right now. I often will feel this “calling” to prayer when I have become spiritually slothful (acedia: spiritual torpor and apathy - ennui). It is a slow slackening of the spiritual discipline in my life, a total loss of vigilance. I become the disciples sleeping in the garden. I have let down my guard. I am open and prone for attack.
I recognize the signs of acedia when I find myself becoming impatient (without thinking about), reacting harshly (impulsively), and most importantly when I have slipped in my prayer routine or devotions. I am no longer at peace. This is often a “creep” – not one big thing, but a thousands little things. I am convinced this is a subtle, but powerful form of spiritual warfare, where we little by little hand over territory in our lives to the prowling lion just on the fringes of the shadows in our life. He is waiting and gladly takes what we will willingly (“my life is just too busy today…”) hand over no matter how small or insignificant – skipping our morning offering, forgetting to pray at meals, skipping mass because we don’t feel well, etc. Everyday we can think of a “thousand reasons” not to pray. Our lives are busy.
Just yesterday as I was hurrying to work, I found myself without thinking about it reacting harshly to the drivers around me. I was surprised by my reaction, and immediately recognized that I was not at peace. This was a sign to me that I needed to refocus, and take a sanity check of my faith and prayer life. I had become slack, loose, apathetic…
This morning, through grace, I felt the need to verbally surrender these circumstances over to God as many of them are out of my control. I often find myself internalizing the stress in my life (unconsciously). Without prayer I am convinced I would continue to be unaware of the effect this stress has on my life only to see it bubble over in self-destructive ways. Prayer allows me to listen not only to God and how he is working in my life, but it also allows me to listen to my own heart. It is vigilance, it is keeping watch with our Lord, and it is the light that chases the shadows away. I have heard it said, “A Christian without prayer is like a wounded soldier in battle.” It is our daily bread and without out it we are weak, wounded soldier in a raging battle all around us.
I found Rich’s statement, “Unbelief is the root of all anxiety,” especially insightful. I can see this playing out in the lives of those around me everyday, and also in my own life (internalized stress). It is during those times when I am on autopilot and coasting through life not listening and not praying that I find myself most prone to anxiety. Let us be spiritually vigilant and see the importance of the “thousand little things” that make up our spiritual lives.
Peace,
Steve
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Romans 12:12
Ephesians 6: 10-18
A year ago, Life Group devotee Steve Castle, made a comment on "acedia." Today, a "Slice of Infinity" column from Life Group devotee Chad Livingston's blog came out which explains acedia further. I thought it was a great essay and well worth sharing. It implies the "divine exchange" -- the circle of blessing -- which can only be fulfilled if we are willing to love as God loves and forgive as God forgives. It is through trust gained through unconditional love (the relationship) that we influence and are influenced. Until the Christian heart is wide open to sinners, they won't hear our message. And the evidence of a heart wide open -- a heart that has been forgiven much -- is sacrifice. We prove our love to others through sacrifice just as God proved His love for us through sacrifice.
"Magnanimity"
In the early fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer penned The Canterbury Tales, a sometimes bawdy, often hilarious, and always sharply critical satire on the religious folk of his day. The “tales” of the pilgrims make up the content of the story. Despite their common path of pilgrimage to Canterbury, Chaucer’s Christian characters are largely examples of the corruption and dissolute living that had overtaken virtue in the church. However, in the case of “The Parson’s Tale,” Chaucer gives us an extended prose narrative intended to instruct the pilgrims in Christian morality. This tale, by contrast, represented the kind of Christianity Chaucer espoused as ideal, and so he gives the Parson the last word of the narrative.(1)
The Parson’s Tale presents a theological treatise on repentance and how to overcome the “seven deadly sins” with the virtues of the spiritual life. One of those virtues is magnanimity offered as the virtue to combat the sin of acedia. Now, acedia was considered one of the most serious of sins. It manifested itself in sloth or spiritual despair, but more significantly embodied the temptation to give up caring about anything truly important. Acedia led to spiritual impotence and smallness of heart. Spiritual impotence would allow vice to flourish and virtue to languish, not because vice was purposely chosen or intentionally entered into, but because spiritual lassitude desiccated one’s concern to be virtuous.
In our day, this same acedia distracts many a Christian pilgrim from following the way of Jesus. Author Kathleen Norris warns that acedia “is known to foster excessive self-justification, as well as a casual yet implacable judgmentalism toward others,” and readily lends itself to this process of spiritual apathy.(2) With this understanding, we can see why the Parson would encourage magnanimity to combat acedia, for a magnanimous person is a person who is generous of spirit, caring, and gracious in forgiveness. Chaucer, through the voice of the Parson, warns that “a great heart is needed against acedia, lest it swallow up the soul.” A great heart is a magnanimous heart full of generosity and graciousness, eager to forgive. Acedia, on the other hand, makes our hearts small, consumed not with care for the things God cares for, but devoured by things that do not matter at all.
Acedia further makes it easy for me to pluck the speck out of my sister’s eye while I ignore the log in my own. This propensity to see others as the primary problem, while elevating one’s own self is a clear sign that acedia has taken root in one’s life. On the contrary, magnanimity, as Norris notes, “requires creativity to recognize our faults, and to discern virtues in those we would rather disdain. Forgiveness demands close attention, flexibility, and stringent self-assessment, faculties that are hard to come by as we careen blindly into the twenty-first century, and are increasingly asked to choose information over knowledge, theory over experience, and certainty over ambiguity.”(4)
Like the Parson’s Tale, Jesus shared many tales, parables as we know them, regarding the virtuous life. Jesus was inviting those who heard his story to respond by living a kingdom-life here and now. When invited to the house of a Pharisee one evening, a woman who was known to be a sinner entered the house and wept at Jesus’s feet, anointing them with her tears and perfume, and wiping his feet with her hair. Now in Jesus’s day, a man would not allow a woman to touch him, let alone a woman who was a known sinner. The Pharisee who invited Jesus knew this, and he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet he would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching him” (Luke 7:39). Jesus then tells the tale of two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii and the other fifty. Which of them, Jesus asks, when forgiven their debt, would love the moneylender more? The Pharisee replies that the one who owed more would love more. Jesus then delivers the last line of the tale: “For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little” (7:47). Jesus understood the importance of magnanimity in the fight against a small, acedic heart. As his followers, will we simply continue as idle pilgrims on the way to vacant Canterburys, missing the true heart of the pilgrimage? Or will we hear the tale of Christ, follow in his virtuous steps, and discover along the way the hopeful significance of pilgrims, pilgrimage, and finding ourselves at home in the Kingdom.
Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.
(1) Ed. Larry Benson, "Explanatory Notes,” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 956.
(2) Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me (New York: Penguin, 2008), 116.
(3) Ibid.
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