Sunday,
August 16
Opening Prayer: Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient
and so new, late have I loved you! And
behold, you were within me and I was outside, and there I sought for you, and
in my deformity I rushed headlong into the well-formed things that you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. ~St.
Augustine
Scripture: Psalm 90:1-17
Journal: Are you living the life God most wants to live in
you? If not, why not? What does it mean to ask God to number our
days?
Reflection:
How do we go about living the life that we most
deeply long to live? How do we live a
life of depth and quality with God, which will lead to a life of depth and
quality with our families and our friends and our world? It doesn't just happen, say the saints and
the poets, it takes some reflection and intention and desire. “We fool
ourselves if we think that such a sacramental way of living is automatic,”
Richard Foster once wrote. “This kind
of living communion does not just fall on our heads. We must desire it and seek it out. We must order our lives in particular
ways.”
Call it Christian
practice, call it spiritual disciplines, or call it means of grace, but
somehow we have to prayerfully consider how to move in the direction of the
life we think God most wants to live in us. The church fathers called that
somehow a Rule of Life. St. Benedict's rule is the most famous
example. It involves identifying what we
most want our lives to be about—in St. Benedict's case, prayer—and then
figuring out, as best we can, how we will move in the direction of making that
life a possibility; creating space and time for that life to be able to
happen. The happening of it is
ultimately up to God, but making the space and the time is our part. We must listen and pray and plan and order
our lives in certain ways, so that at the end of our days we don't find
ourselves wondering how we've somehow missed it.
St. Benedict wrote a rule to
order his life, and the life of his community, around the practice of
prayer; in his heart and soul he knew that everything else must revolve around
that. Everything else would involve the things that were
necessary to make a life of prayer possible: in order to pray we must eat, and
in order to eat we must work, and in order to work we must rest, all in order
that we might pray. A holistic approach
to life for sure—spiritual, physical, vocational, and relational. His rule became the simple rhythm that his
community lived by.
If we are serious about living the life we
most deeply long to live, it must be the same for us. It won't just fall
on our heads either. We must begin to live our lives purposefully and
intentionally. What is the old adage? "If you aim at
nothing, you'll hit it every time." We must begin to live by a
thoughtful and prayerful rule as well. (Becoming by Jim Branch)
Prayers
Closing Prayer: I ask you, Lord Jesus, to develop in me, your
lover, an immeasurable urge towards you, an affection that is unbounded,
longing that is unrestrained, fervor that throws discretion to the winds! The more worthwhile our love for you, all the
more pressing does it become. Reason
cannot hold it in check, fear does not make it tremble, wise judgment does not
temper it. (The Fire of Love by Richard Rolle)
