Shut Down Upon Our Little Days

I’ve always been something of a worrier, a personal trait that has never done me or anyone around me any good. Like so many other of my quirks, I have tried to pray it away or master it by stern self-discipline, but it remains as much a part of me as my freckles or my bone structure.

Last time we were back in Texas, I found a tattered little prayer book in an antique store and bought it for five dollars (I’ve since learned that a used copy of this book sells on a major website for something like $80 or $90). Stuffed inside its pages were various holy cards and prayer cards that have come to mean much to me, including a little pocket calendar put out by a Catholic church down the road from where Mrs. Orr lived as a child. The prayer book is My Prayer Book, by Father F.X. Lasance (1908, Benziger Brothers, Inc., New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago, San Francisco, Nihil Obstat Father Remy Lafort, Imprimatur Archbishop John M. Farley).

It was only recently that I began using the book regularly and in earnest as a catalyst for my own prayers, and I’ve been very pleased at the results. One section that I’ve been chewing on for days is this one, found on pp. 51-52, is this one:

One secret of a sweet and happy Christian life is learning to live by the day. It is the long stretches that tire us. We think of life as a whole, running on for us. We can not carry this load until we are three score and ten. We can not fight this battle continually for half a century. But really there are no long stretches. Life does not come to us all at one time; it comes only a day at a time. Even to-morrow is never ours until it becomes to-day, and we have nothing whatever to do with it but to pass down to it a fair and good inheritance in to-day’s work well done, and today’s life well lived. It is a blessed secret this, of living by the day. Any one can carry his burden, however heavy, till nightfall. Any one can do his work, however hard, for one day. Any one can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. .And this is all life ever means to us – just one little day. Do to-day’s duty; fight to-day’s temptations, and do not weaken or distract yourself by looking forward to things you can not see, and could not understand if you saw them. God gives us nights to shut down upon our little days. We can not see beyond. Short horizons make life easier and give us one of the blessed secrets of brave, true holy living.

Short horizons. Short horizons. This simply lovely phrase braces me up, like a strong tonic. My besetting sin in this life has been despair, and this despair flows from my trying to carry my burdens for 70 years, to fight this battle for 50 years at a stretch, to live forever thinking of tomorrow and trying to anticipate its evils and the twists in its path.

But my heart lifts when I think on what Father Lasance has written here…that I can carry this burden for one day. For one day, until nightfall, until the sun goes down, until God gives us another night to shut down upon my little day.

Yes. Short horizons make life easier, they ease the cut of the pack’s straps into my shoulders, and they refresh me. They do not lift the burden, because the burden, the suffering, is the point, the lesson, and yes, the blessing. I am not a strong man nor a brave man by anyone’s estimation….I would lunge forward and fasten my lips on a numbing  narcotic sponge without hesitation. And yet I believe it is His spirit within me that leads me to words like those I have quoted, that draws me towards battered little forgotten books in humid shops run by lisping little fops in flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts.

My daily burdens can be borne. I don’t want to bear them, but they can be borne. Christ grant me grace and strength to live for one day.

One day.

~ S.K. Orr

Note — for anyone interested, I found an online version of My Prayer Book.