Our FAVORITE liturgical season is upon us!
As a friend said yesterday, “Advent always ends way too early, and Lent always seems to go on forever”…
Here’s a little video I worked up about one intention I mean to set for the next seven weeks: setting a guard over my mouth…asking God to keep watch at the door of my lips…
Meanwhile I have deleted my twitter/X app, and at this late stage of the game, am paying attention to the Psalms in a whole new way.
I have prayed the Divine Office Morning and Evening for years, I’m ashamed to say without ever really paying much attention to the order, numbering, et cetera. Almost all of them are at least familiar to me. I know Psalm 95 of course, the Invitatory Psalm, and Psalm 51 that we say every Friday morning (I wonder why THAT one strikes with particular force…”Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness…In guilt I was born, a sinner I was conceived…”), and long snatches of many others.
But I am now writing down the first line of each of the 150, and starting at Psalm 1, copying each of them down in a notebook down by hand, and poring over the Rule of St. Benedict, and really seeing and studying why and how they are set forth in a particular order, and equally as thrillingly, realizing in a whole new way that when we pray the Psalms, we are participating in an unbroken line of pray-ers that stretches back millenia…and thus prayer in particular, and the Psalms in particular, become a true “labora” and as such, almost a living, breathing, treasury/body…one extension of the heart of Christ who himself knew and prayed the Psalms…
St. Benedict had his monks memorize all 150…I wonder if memorization isn’t a skill we should “bring back”…the antihesis in a way of computing at lightning speed…a work that is slow, laborious, and that because it is slow and laborious, seeps into our body, blood, bones heart, brain…
I’m also listening to Catholic lectures on literature, C.S. Lewis, various saints, bioethics. As they say about addictions to alcohol and drugs, you can’t make a vow to quit and just sit there “white-knuckliing” it…you get to replace the time and energy spent on the addiction with something else…thus I hope during Lent to gently wean myself away from less useful pastimes/kneejerk scrolling through my phone and replace those activities with stuff that truly is WAY more compelling…
With all that, Indian Wells first rounds starts tomorrow. I won’t watch but I will check the scores. I do have my limits.
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