The Road (Oh, Hell!) of Good Intentions
On this sixth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on
Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ
is born.
It’s New Year’s Eve morning as I write. Tonight my wife and I will go to the
traditional New Year’s Eve party at the home of some friends. Having already eaten too much over Christmas,
we will eat too much more. There will be those among the large
gathering, I suspect, who will drink too much, too. But this excess is very, very good, because it
takes us right down the entrance ramp to the American tradition of New Year’s
Resolutions. It’s an enormous highway, a
dozen lanes filled bumper-to-bumper…for a few days. Traffic thins out pretty quickly, and pretty
soon lanes merge and then merge again and by the end of the year, the road to
good intentions has narrowed to a lightly traveled footpath.
Pazienza di Dio,
vicinanza di Dio,
tenerezza di Dio.
The patience of God,
the closeness of God,
the tenderness of God.
As mentioned in yesterday’s posting, Pope Francis gave us a
tricycle to ride, stable and certain transportation. And how perfect that the first of the three
characteristics to which he called us this Christmas season is patience. It is good, as well, that he calls us not
merely to patience, but to the patience of
God.
Our own patience is inadequate. At an Alanon meeting a few years ago, someone
shared a maxim that has stuck with me: expectations are premeditated
resentments. He was speaking of our
expectations of others, but I believe that the statement is equally true of our
expectations of ourselves. Remember Francis’s essential premise, that
the central meaning of Christmas is not our call to love God, but to accept our
smallness and let God love us!
Yesterday morning I had coffee with two close friends, and
our conversation began with a query about…New Year’s Resolutions. A blessing of our threesome is our spectrum
of preference and style on many things, even as we share the same values. The spectrum shown in a rainbow draws us to
look at something ordinary – light – opened to expose for a moment its mystery
and beauty. Here are some statements
that opened us to a colorful and stimulating conversation about intentions and
hopes. As we respect and appreciate each other, we spent some time looking at
New Year’s Resolutions from each other’s perspectives.
What do I stand for every day? What do I stand for any day? One was
inclined to desire consistency and continuity in his life, persistently caring
about certain issues or values. The
other was inclined to wake up each day and be present to the specific
experiences or awarenesses that emerged that day. Mission and Mindfulness.
Don’t “should” on
me. I’ve already should on myself. He might as well have said “’should’ is
shit!” For years I’ve tried to discourage
my wife from saying we should do something when what she means is that she’d
enjoy us doing something. But “we should”
and “we’ve got to” remains a common phrase.
But when my friend shared this phrase, I realized that the reason that I’m
so sensitive to my wife (or anyone else) putting a demand on me is that I’ve
already put too many demands on myself.
More – Enough: In
our threesome, one of us was quite inclined (driven?) to want to do more, while another was quite content
with the desire to reflect on the sense that he has, is, and does enough.
And this last statement calls me to close. Among Jesuit-formed people, a name for God is
“Magis” – the more. This
Jesuit-formed Pope and our Jesuit-formed martyr Fr. Delp call us to know that
it is God who is enough. It is God who
calls us to “Basta” – Enough! We are
not called to be Magis; that’s God’s work.
We are called to allow God to love us, and that, sweet Jesus, is enough!
I believe that God
calls me not to the ten-lane expressway of New Year’s Resolutions but to walk
with Him on the narrow daily path, to experience God’s patient love.
Should I resolve to take God up on that? It would, I’m certain, be enough.
Tomorrow – the closeness
of God
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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