Questions

Following up on Sunday's post, here is a response to one set of questions with which I've been inspired to pray through the course of this week.


How do I experience God's presence? Christ's call? The Holy Spirit's guidance?
God's grandeur greeted me in the horizon's fiery sunrise glow as I began a new week with a run around Worcester's hilly neighborhoods. My foggy breath, visible in the calm and frosty air, reminded me of the locomotives that ply Worcester's railyards– hulking machines with cores of diesel-fueled steel inspiring my meeker frame of blood-stoked, air-powered, muscle-driven flesh. 


In meeting and greeting two of my brothers around campus before 7am– one heading to his office, another heading to the gym– I recalled the variety of morning people and night owls in the house. We're a community that rarely sleeps; at almost every hour of the day, at least one of us is awake– rising before the sun to pray, correcting papers in the wee hours of the night, teaching a class or meeting with students, ministering to hospital patients in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, writing a scholarly article or an insightful homily, celebrating Mass, gathering for food and fellowship with the community. I'm one of the early birds; this morning offered me the insight of appreciating the place of my own daily rhythms of work, prayer, and rest within those of the community.


I feel called to see (and be) Christ's caring presence in the house as much as outside of it. I beheld such care today when, coming home for lunch, I found that one of my brothers had left at my door the special section of today's New York Times that detailed the results and stories of yesterday's New York City Marathon. Later in the afternoon, mulling over a new project for work and some other ideas brewing over the past few weeks, I noticed a growing desire for creativity that's slowly nudging aside some old attitudes of frustration. I'm used to waiting for an invitation to get involved in a project, and am more comfortable responding to immediate needs and requests than I am with proposing new ideas to address a given issue or area of concern. That won't change overnight, yet notions of such a shift in my way of thinking, doing, and being are slowly reaching into my heart, just as the streaks of late-afternoon sunlight slant delightfully through my windows and spread their subtle illuminations into my room.

College of the Holy Cross

Worcester MA