When Everything Goes Wrong

The other day I finally listened to Bishop Robert Barron talking with Dr. Jordan Peterson on the latter's podcast.  There were several good things that struck me from it and I would certainly recommend listening to it (you can find the video here), but there is one thing in particular upon which I want to reflect at this moment: the idea of right praise.

Bishop Barron mentioned the liturgical nature of the writing of the creation account in the book of Genesis and the reason for its structure: "The end of a liturgical procession is the one who will lead the praise."  Of course it was man that was created last of all the animals.  Therefore, when God gives Adam and Eve dominion over all the creatures there is far more to it than most of us would think when we hear the word dominion.  The dominion indicated is a lordship over the animals, but in order to lead them to praise of the Creator.  "All of these things belong in a chorus of praise of the true God led by us," said Bishop Barron.  It is our duty to praise God.

When we fail in that duty, much as when the Israelites turned to idols, everything goes wrong.  They became enslaved and began to lose their battles and suffered plagues and droughts and so on.  It is little different for us.

Right praise is essential for our daily lives.  Christ taught us that in the prayer He gave us, praising our loving Father in heaven: "Hallowed be Thy name."

Our daily lives often teach us its necessity in other ways.  I have certainly found it so.

Praise began to become a necessary part of my daily life through indirect participation in the Charismatic Renewal.  Listening to praise and worship music taught me to raise my eyes above my own struggles to look toward God.  One of these songs in particular seized my heart in the midst of some personal darkness and confusion: the song Blessed Be Your Name, which beautifully proclaims a decision to praise God no matter whether things go well or ill from a human perspective and which references the book of Job.

I keep being reminded that the devil's tempting revolves around one primary tactic: to make us look at ourselves instead of at God.  Praise powerfully counters that temptation by turning our gaze away from ourselves and toward God.

When I become focused on my struggles, my failure to achieve anything worthwhile, my inability even to accomplish the little duties I see before me, and so on, it is easy to become discouraged.  It is easy to feel hopeless.  Yet such feelings merely reveal disorder in the hierarchy of my life.  I was created not to establish my own little safe world of accomplishments and perfect order, but to give God right praise.

If there are places in your life where you are struggling perhaps you might dare to ask yourself whether the cause is the same.  Are you looking at yourself or are you giving God right praise?

God's Providence allows all that is.  By His will, including His permissive will, He has brought everything to this moment exactly as it is.  Thus no matter how dark the moment it is part of His plan.  And we also are part of that plan.  We take our rightful role when we choose to fulfill our vocation of leading all creation in giving praise to God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A Day Reflecting a Lifetime: Wisdom from the End of the Third Decade

As I lifted my canoe to my shoulder and walked with it down to the lake, I had no thought of finding spiritual reflection.  I wanted simply to enjoy time spent in nature as a way to celebrate reaching the completion of three decades in this mortal coil.  Yet somehow that connection back to creation could not help but stir the soul toward connection with the Creator and that connection must needs shed light upon our wandering journey upon this earth.

Dipping my paddle in the lake first on one side of the canoe and then the other, I made my wending way across its surface, not knowing where I would end up or how long I could go on while the sun beat hot upon me.  I could have grown discouraged at my lack of progress as I struggled on, watching kayaks pass me with bows straight while my canoe's bow turned back and forth, floundering about a bit like a dying fish.  The delightful thing about a piece of plastic folded into a canoe—I call it my origami canoe—is its lightness, but of course that very lightness means it takes little to send it back and forth from side to side as if it had no clear sense of direction.  Each stroke of my paddle as I knelt in its center moved me as much to right or left as it did forward.  Every wave, no mater how small, and every breath of wind pushed me about in some direction or other.

Instead of growing discouraged as I do when things go awry in the minutiae of daily life I found my mind turned to reflection.  My journey across the lake became an analogy for life.

I tend to think that one ought to set one's sight on a goal and head directly toward it without turning to one side or the other, pursuing one's vocation and life purpose with unfailing success.  Yet somehow the path across the years seems rather to wend back and forth across the waters of life.

Alone in the canoe I could not keep a straight course.  It would have been easier with a companion, for we would have balanced each other's paddle strokes, working in unison toward that goal.  A companion too would have broken the silence that hung about me and seemed to wrap me about in a strange sort of contemplation.

It was not the doing that mattered even though the working of my muscles to send the canoe skimming across the waters gave me a feeling of strength, of belonging, of doing what I was created to do.  It was being that mattered more.  Instead of needing, seeking, striving, and a hundred other verbs describing our efforts to take control, I was responding gently to what came to me, breathing in the fresh air, as free as the proverbial child.

Why do we not live so?  Why do we fret and worry ourselves into illness or misery on account of the littlest things?

Sometimes I wonder whether this lack of peace and the rampant anxiety and depression in our society comes solely from this frenzied life that we live in this modern world we like to consider progressive and advanced and enlightened.  Have we achieved these seemingly-good adjectives only at the expense of our inner peace?  Perhaps even at the expense of contemplation?

Then I must wonder how much we would give up to regain that peace. Would we surrender all that we hold dear in order to cross the void of emptiness into that great work of the soul that is God's gift of contemplation?

Perhaps then we might forget our faltering footsteps and breathe in unison with a deeper force: the breath that stirred the waters at creation.

Veni Sancte Spiritus!