It’s been a so-so Lent for me. Always falling behind in prayer, distracted by periodical reading, disorganized, lazy as ever, and, therefore, scatter-brained as ever in matters both material and spiritual, pestered by temptations and unworthy thoughts and angry bouts, and deeply worried to the point of agony and persistent anxiety about finances.
This morning, having fallen behind in my spiritual reading regimen in the several valumes called In Conversation with God by Francis Fernandez, I am called in today’s reading to meditate on Christ’s Agony in the Garden. What’s always driven home to me about that, the opening moment in Christ’s Passion, is how the disciples, despite their best efforts, fell asleep when Christ needed their comfort and support the most and for them to keep a vigil. He warns them to stay engaged with The Master unless they be put to the test. I don’t want to be put to the test. I better stay awake with Christ, keep a vigil, pray to be spared the useless agonies sin inflicts upon us, pray to the Holy Spirit for His gifts, especially Understanding, and especially over the coming Holy Week.
Today , 4/8/22, is neice Mary Beth’s 62nd birthday — she for whom I once served as babysitter. I must call her, chat with her, as well as entering the obligatory greeting in Facebook, along with the thread of other well-wishers. But I am ever-mindful, where my family is concerned, that just about all of them long ago abandoned the practice of the faith. I’ve got my own spiritual row to hoe and reparations to make….but I believe it is my role to pray for their conversion and perhaps, only with the greatest of subtlety, suggest that they consider the time of their lives, the short duration of this earthly pilgrimage — and all that stuff. (We’ve all heard it before, right?) And that goes especially for my brother Bill, caught up in his own emprisoning agony, confined to a bed in a rehabilitation center, angry, yearning to go home where, though he does not know it or, more likely, cannot accept it, he is unlikely to return — and perhaps now suffering from dimentia, as an added burden, and lashing out.
God help him. Let me help him. He is first born of Bill and Jo Wayland. Somehow, I want to help all of us.
But let me, finally, by urgently mending the broken state of my own scandelous life, speak to them with my actions, not so much with my few careful words.
The day is far spent….
The night is dark and we are far from home.
Amen.
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