I forget sometimes that I’m an alcoholic, bodily and mentally different from my fellows as we say in recovery. Not that I don’t devote what seems like a trillion hours a week to keeping myself in fit spiritual condition, but sometimes my nervous system, psyche etc just go faintly to severely haywire for an apparent reason.
Inevitably one of the first symptoms is insomnia. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep at all though exhausted and other times I fall asleep but wake at 2 or 2:30 or 3 which is just a terrible drag as I am one million percent a morning person and my circadian rhythm is hard-wired when awake in the a.m. to get up, start drinking coffee, and embark on a frenzy of activity.
ESPECIALLY when I’m exhausted as I’m afraid I’ll be too tired to “get everything done” if I pace myself and so try to do it all at once, the idea being that after I perform my zillions of household chores, administrative tasks, correspondence responding-to, research and writing, to name just a few, I will then allow myself to go back to bed. Which never but never happens.
That’s just normal times. Throw in any kind of cultural/political/religious “situation” on which I have AN OPINION and God help me. I’m like a dog with a bone, talking to myself, jotting notes, constructing an airtight argument by means of which I hope to persuade the world and God that I AM RIGHT.
Like lately, I am SO on board with awe at the Transubstantiation, reverence for the Eucharist, et cetera. I’m very much at odds, however, with the way many people propose to demonstrate that reverence. And so deeply absorbed and exercised and upset and indignant and desirous of building a case did I become that I stopped going to Mass for a few days!
Yesterday morning after about 4 hours of sleep, I was out on the patio with my prayer books thinking Oh my God, I will never never make it through this day. And suddenly I realized, Why not go to the 7 at Sts. Peter and Paul? Just as suddenly, my whole being kind of righted. I was still tired, but not tired plus depressed plus frustrated plus pissed at the world.
Right then, I opened my Magnificat to read the day’s liturgy and the accompanying reflection was by Claude La Colombière, 17th-c. Jesuit priest, and was all about the essential nature of daily Mass and of how without Communion he gets tired, crabby, mean (I’m paraphrasing) ,and how if there is ONE THING WE CAN DO, it is to partake of the Eucharist every chance we get.
“I am the vine, you are the branches. Without me you can do nothing.”
Which was really, in a nutshell, my whole point to begin with–except I forgot to take my own advice.
Does that ever happen in your world–that you’re stuck or struggling or have just come to some major epiphany, and on the instant practically you come upon a passage that seems specifically, directly, written to/for you?
The weather broke last night as well. A cool, refreshing breeze blew and It actually rained a teeny bit in the Sonoran desert. I went out and walked in it and this morning–for the Feast of the Birth of St. John the Baptist–feel cleansed.
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