Summer, oh, summer. 2023
Another June is almost gone. Summer’s prelude, almost gone again. So fast. Florida, not New England. No special blooms here.
My June’s spent in the early times of this century at the conferences at Portsmouth Abbey — they were fine, blessed times, solitary times in which I was being the person I was meant to be, pursuing the kind of interests….spiritual….where, while wandering a beautiful campus at the edge of Narragansett Bay, I was called to contemplate the good, the true, the beautiful…where Our Lady was in her shrine before candles, where it was plain life was real, earnest, because to live is Christ, ( so they tell me) and I will reject and then again embrace that truth hour by hour as I approach the edge of the bay. The Great Bay. The temptations never relent, the sins, too, even as the opportunities to sin deminish. But there are always opportunities, pride being the temptation that never relents, and the greatest sin.
It rained often during those conferences, forcing us indoors. But it was a divine rain. Or so I chose to see a June rain.
If I leave you with one thing, my late mentor told me, it is –to pray!
Pray contantly. Never lose hope.
I will take to the road soon, planned trip, a month away. But still immersed in sin. July away. I’m always anxious, never totally happy.
Another late mentor told me always to remember the two most important questions: who am I, and what am I doing here?
I pray for the intercession of lost mentors, the fever of life long over for them. I pray they are happy and with God. (I am always teasingly tempted to think of death as ‘lights out’, oblivion, and therefore, all this human nonsense precisely that, absurd nonesense. All is permitted, if only we could shake off the ghosts of theological machinations being worked in our midst by hypocrits. And then I realize the constant unsatisfying groping after justice and love and peace by the very people who would earnestly tell us this is all an empty spectacle, sound and fury, signifying nothing. I heard the parents of a murder victim say the death penalty was too good for their son’s murderer. They plainly must conceive of divine justice beyond this life — and, therefore, a divinely just and good Judge. And a source, untapped, of consolation for their and remedy for their anger.)
I must embrace and enjoy what grace comes wrapped up — in the fever of life, and in my fellow mortals whom I must love endlessly as they love me, and love my enemies.
God is Perfect Love. Try getting your head around that. Don’t despair. Believe.
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