Fresh Starts ... New Beginnings

It has been 72 days now since Shirli and I decided that it was in our best interest to self-sequester on account of the Covid-19 virus.

It was a bit of an adjustment at first. We are, even though we are not socialites, still social creatures. We still, despite the presence of the virus, need to make an occasional excursion into town to purchase the necessary essentials that pertain to life.

Masks and gloves, until the statistics show that Covid-19 and its associated hazards is well on its way to being something other than it is, are part of the new normal that we have accepted. No. We are not motivated by fear. We are motivated by caution. We are motivated by concern for others. We are, also, following the recommendation of our primary care physician.

The hardest adjustment for us to make had to do with the cessation of public Masses. When what is taking place in the Sacrifice of the Mass becomes real to people, when life honestly begins to revolve around being there and receiving Christ according to our understanding as Catholic followers of Christ, televised Masses only tend to exacerbate our hunger to be physically near to Jesus in the Sacrifice of the Mass.

I have been reading The Ladder of Divine Ascent by Saint John Climacus [A.D. 579-649]. John Climacus was the abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai and is venerated by both the Latin Rite and Eastern churches. I am, at this point in my reading, about three-fourths of the way through the book. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, in a number of ways, fleshes out some of the things that Saint Benedict [A.D. 480-547] writes in The Rule of Saint Benedict.

Saint John Climacus wrote, “Keeping watch over one’s thoughts is one thing, and protecting one’s mind is yet another. So far as the east is from the west, so much loftier is the latter than the first, even if it is more toilsome. It is one thing to pray for liberation from evil thoughts, and yet another to oppose them, another to detest and reject them.”

There is a lot of challenge in those words. It is not enough to merely recognize our moral faults and failures. We are challenged to do something about them.

Fresh starts. New beginnings.

We all have a divine calling upon our lives. Our callings differ in nature but they all serve toward the same purpose and end … to draw us personally closer to Christ in our individual relationships with him, and, hopefully as a consequence of being close to Christ, we show others the way to salvation. Every day offers us the opportunity to make whatever adjustments are necessary in our lives in order to be more perfectly centered in God’s will so that we can continue pressing on toward all that he has for us … both now during our earthly sojourn and then in eternity as our reward for serving him here in this life.