Lagrimas de Christo Enjuagenme

The title of this blog is Espanol for “Tears of Christ wash me” and I totally feel this way many times throughout the day. In past times I found it very hard to think of things to pray for even though they were and always will be around me. Throughout this month many things have happened to me, to others I love and know and now I find that there is so much to pray for. 1Thessalonians 5 has been speaking to me like a voice crying out in the desert for some time now and I have felt such a great need for prayer. The particular passage of which I speak is when St. Paul exhorts people to “Pray without ceasing”. I feel the great need to heed these words in my life. Our culture, everyone I know, and all those I don’t know are so hungry for the help that God is calling me to in prayer. I feel as though I am suspended over a void with Christ the only one that is holding me and everyone else up. What strength, what docility, what hunger he has for our souls to be with him. His desire is to raise us up, but we resist so much. I never really understood why consecrated people choose to go into a lifestyle where all they do is pray, meditate and intercede for those that they don’t know. I now understand to a great degree that call. The austerity of solitude, the openness to trust, the tears and hopes wash down my sullen cheeks as I arrive in the quiet dark church. Candles flicker, silent holiness waits, souls cry out in deafening silence as my fingers traverse the beads. All is not quiet on the western front, the battle rages, the knees weaken, the will flicker as do the candles but continue I must. They need me, they need my contemplation, my affection, my strength, my life. It is however not so much me that they need, but rather who I dimly point to as if a mirror. Oh Jesu, my God, my Life, my all graciously hear my petition and plea, the fervency of my prayers arises to you as fragrance from a crushed garlic clove, bitter and yet sweet and inviting. Keep me and those I pray for in your care, in the Holy of Holies, your Sacre Coeur that I to may someday be able to enjoy with all those that I pray for the splendor of your truth, your inner most intimate life and the communion I so desire.

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than the suns and the stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning - solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may take acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude." -- from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Conduct of Life"

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breath his native air
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter, fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind;
Quiet by day.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mixed, sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Alexander Pope

Currently listening to Mozart: Requiem in D Minor, K. 626: 3. Sequentia: Lacrimosa