13 December 2013 - docile hearts

13 December 2013 - docile hearts

Those who follow you, Lord, will have the light of life.
We follow the LORD when we delight in his law and meditate on it day and night.  We listen to him when he teaches us what is for our good. 

 When his law is written on our hearts we are docile to respond to God's call.  When he calls for joy and dancing we are able to dance.  When he sings a dirge we are able to mourn.  The way of the LORD is not static.  It is not something which we can learn once intellectually and then follow without turning back to God.  We must constantly seek his guidance.  He leads us on the way we should go.  If we look away we find ourselves in darkness.  We stumble and fall.  We must walk while we have the light (cf. Joh 12:35).  There are times when joy is called for and times when we should mourn.  We are slow to understand this.  The joy we often want is not his joy and the sorrow we indulge is not his sorrow.

 We tend to mourn things which are all but irrelevant in the eyes of eternity and to be indifferent to the things that move the heart of God.  We are not called to be impassive or indifferent, either.  It is appropriate to feel sorrow for things that are truly sorrowful.  This can be a fuel for prayer and repentance.  The Church gives us times and seasons both for mourning and for joy to guide us in this practice.  She gives us seasons of fasting to combine our mourning with prayer and fasting in order to seek God's face.  Those periods are forty days and give way to feasts which are fifty days of joy and celebration.  The periods of fasting are not joyless and the periods of feasting are not without mourning.  But they should set the emphasis.  They teach us to approach the sorrowful things of this passing world honestly by relying on God.  They teach us to hope for the time when they give way to the joy and feasting which never ends in Heaven.

 If someone suggests fasting we are quick to resposne, "He is possed by a demon."  We feel like such mourning will overwhelm us and wear us out.  But we will end up mourning something.  Our expectations about how it can wear us out comes from mourning the wrong things.  True mourning brings us closer to God and therefore builds our strength and endurance.  In the same way, we need to let God teach us to take our deepest joy in him.  If we rejoice too much in the things of earth our hearts do grow weary in spite of the stimulation.

 When we let God direct our hearts in this way we will see that "wisdom is vindicated by her works."  We find ourselves sustained and strong, able to weather any storm.

 He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.

These ideas are inspired by a talk I heard by Father James Mangan.