O Lord, Master of my life, grant that I
may not be infected with the spirit of slothfulness and faintheartedness, with
the spirit of ambition and vain talking.
O Lord and King, bestow upon me the grace
of being aware of my sin, and of not judging my brother, for you are blessed
forever and ever. Amen.
O God, purify me a sinner and have mercy
on me (3x)
O Lord and King, bestow…
The
Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian
Reflection
– Our slow reading of this prayer, which
is so central to the Byzantine Lenten spirit, and which we have adopted in
Madonna House as part of our daily Lenten prayer, has taken us to the line of patience and love.
If purity and humility had to do with the
right inward and outward ordering of our energies, these next two virtues line
up as concerning a certain negative and positive response to life.
Patience concerns the reality that we
live in a world that is deeply flawed, where there is much happening in us and
outside of us that is unpleasant to us, and may in fact be quite wrong on one
level or another. There is moral wrong to contend with, and physical wrongs—the
aches and pains, stresses and strains of daily life.
By moral wrong, I am not especially
thinking of great and terrible evils and injustices, but what is more often the
case—the painful reality of living with people who are alternately irritable,
selfish, thoughtless, lazy, too loud, too quiet, messy, uptight, greedy,
foolish—and that’s just my brother priests at MH! (Kidding!) Not too mention
our own terrible persistent moral failures and sins, which despite our bestest
efforts (which, let’s be honest, are not always there), just keep hanging on.
And then just the physical difficulty of
life in the world. Especially as one gets older, there are the aches and pains
of the body, but of course there are any number of such things—hard toil and
terribly difficult circumstances and situations, where perhaps there is little
or no moral fault to be seen, but great pain and distress nonetheless. We in
North America live with a surfeit of the world’s goods, but many in the world
live with at least some hunger and a degree of difficulty in daily life that we
in the prosperous West find hard to imagine.
The virtue of patience is simply that of
being able to live peacefully and gently in a world where there is a great deal
going on in and around us that is wrong. That
hurts us. That we would change, if we could, but we can’t. Patience is a very
deep thing, even if it has an essentially negative aspect—that is, it consists
in itself in a certain passivity of being which is hard for us. We like to fix
things, to tackle problems and solve them.
The problem is that, when confronted with
a problem we cannot solve (which is quite often not a problem but a person)
without the virtue of patience we want to just get rid of it (him, her). And so
we have the trail of broken promises, broken commitments, broken relationships,
broken lives in our world today. No matter what, no matter who, no matter how,
if you commit yourself to a marriage or a community, patience is utterly and
vitally necessary for perseverance in that commitment. We simply have to learn
to ‘put up’ with each other.
And in that putting up with each other,
we enter into a deep mystery of God and of Christ. First, there is the mystery
of God’s permissive will—He is allowing this thing, this situation, even though
He knows it hurts us, even though it may be excruciatingly painful. There is
some kind of call to awesome trust, to awesome faith, to a depth of vision of
God’s action in our lives, especially as we are confronted with insurmountably
difficult situations. Is God good? Does He love us? What is going on here?
Patience delivers us over to these most profound spiritual questions, and
pushes us to go deeper into them, and into the mystery of God.
Then there is the reality of Christ—the
patience of God made manifest. When we are called to simply endure wrongs
patiently, to ‘take one for the team’, there is in that, even when it may be a
small thing (that person I live with who has this bad habit that Drives! Me!
Crazy!), or maybe not such a small thing, a profound call to identify with
Christ and his bearing the wounds and sins of the world in his person.
Patience, in other words, naturally yields and bears fruit in love, the next
petition of the prayer.
But of course there is a lot to say about
that, and I am out of time and space today. So, tomorrow! To be continued…
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