Easter Monday

Reading this morning in Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, I felt as if the old monk were aiming some of his words directly at me across the centuries. In his eighth letter, he tells the person to whom he’s writing:

I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer; many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering…

And in his ninth letter, discussing a mutual acquaintance, he tells his correspondent:

She seems to me full of good will, but she would go faster than grace. One does not become holy all at once. …

These two subjects, verbosity in prayer and impatience in sanctification, are personal to me, having been thinking quite a bit about my tendency to do both. I think one of the reasons I am finding praying the Rosary and the Divine Office so beneficial is that these established prayers keep a tight rein on my wordiness. Focusing on saying the prayers properly and attentively — instead of thinking ahead and composing the next line of my petition — changes the experience of prayer completely. There exists the danger of letting the recitation of these prayers become rote and mechanical, but at this point on my path, this has not come to pass. The discipline of the structure keeps me focused and, if I may say such a thing about myself, reverent.

And regarding the temptation to “go faster than grace,” well, I am guilty, guilty. I wrote in an earlier post that the thought entered my mind, “I want to be a saint.” And since the thought came to me, the desire has only increased. I battle hourly with impatience at myself and the desire to be pure, holy, unspotted. When I tell myself to be patient, the words seem in my ears to be an excuse, a justification for the ways in which I fall short. Grateful that I’ve been reading these selections, I hope to remind myself not to try and outrun grace. My Father knows what He’s doing.

~ S.K. Orr