If I look back and think about how much prayer and praise
and perpetual adoration was going in that city for the five days of the
conference, it’s pretty amazing. Actually, it should have been Heaven on
Earth—maybe for many people it was. For me, this abundance of spiritual light
threw into sharp relief much of the darkness in the world and in me. I had
prayed Saturday afternoon at Holy Hour that we at the congress might see Christ
in the Eucharist and in each other more clearly. All throughout the rest of the
day, it became more and more clear how much I wasn’t doing that. Especially with regards to the homeless people
on the street. One man asked me for a euro to buy a hot meal and I gave him 50
cents because the alternative would have been a two euro piece. Immediately the
verse came into my mind: “the measure with which you measure will be measured
out to you” (cf. Mt 7:2).[1]
When I went back to night adoration a few hours later, the
light coming from the altar hit my body like a tangible force. Multiple huge
candelabras surrounded the altar on which Christ in the Blessed Sacrament
rested in a pearly white monstrance that just glowed in light of the spotlight.
Faced with all this glory, I felt small and full of darkness. As I knelt I
could just hear Jesus saying, “Now you’re kneeling in front of me, but when I
asked for a favor you only gave me half.” I was automatically praying Glory
Be’s, but my breath felt foul and hypocritical as the prayers crossed my lips.
But I kept praying—what else could I do? Ceasing to pray wouldn’t get me
anywhere either. All that I could do was to keep getting up again, every single
time I fell. I say that every time. Then it hit me that, because of Christ’s
love and his sacrifice, this getting up every single countless time is not
completely pointless. It’s only pointless when we give up. We can become better
people, with God’s help. God wants us to be righteous—fortunately he has the
power to make us so!
Later on, I was imagining telling my friends about the
incident with the homeless man. (I talk to people in my head a lot.) Being
fellow sinners, they may (or may not) have tried to brush away my guilty
feelings or justify my actions to make me feel better. Why wasn’t I imagining
telling Jesus about these things? Because he would have done none of the above.
God doesn’t take excuses, gives no quarter. Yes, no eye, no heart looks upon us
with more love and acceptance and mercy than God’s. But God’s love for us is so
great that he can’t stand to see us trapped in our sins. His merciful gaze
contains an inherent call to change.[2]
When we kneel as sinners before his glory, God takes no prisoners—he refuses to
let us settle with being prisoners of our weaknesses and sinful tendencies, and
gives us the strength to drag ourselves up out of the mud again and again to
let ourselves be transformed by his grace.
[1]
Whatever you may think of my action here, it’s my often stingy attitude that I’m trying to work on.
[2]
This post reminds me a lot of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of
Apollo”, though of course the gods in question are quite of a different
nature. J For the German poem, go here: http://rainer-maria-rilke.de/090001archaischertorso.html
Here is the best English translation I’ve found so far: http://somethingtobedesired.blogspot.de/2006/04/rilke-post-archaic-torso-of-apollo.html
