NOT ENOUGH TIME

Palm Sunday

Prayer, lifting our hearts and minds to God, is our soul’s highest calling and greatest difficulty. It’s not hard to say words to God, and to converse with Him is easy—and good. To lift our hearts and minds to Him, though, is to wait on Him. It’s not something we decide we’re going to do right now, since our favorite TV show doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes.

A conversation with the Lord can take place anytime, anyplace. We can turn our attention to Him and offer Him our words of praise and petition Him for our needs. When we see something in the world around which moves us to wonder or strikes us with beauty, it’s meet and right to immediately turn to God and praise Him for His creation; it’s pointing out something to a Friend. When we learn of someone’s need, it’s meet to say something about it to God. When I don’t know what to do (even more, when I think I do know what to do), it’s right to “bring the Lord in” and ask for His guidance. When the sudden veering of a car jolts my mind to how close death can be, I may be quick, if not eloquent, to call on God!

But God is more than “our very present help in time of trouble.” He is more than a friend. Because He spoke, the Universe came into existence. You exist, second by second, because He wants you to. St Augustine said, “God still creates! He still redeems! He still sanctifies!” Things may look grim to us at any given time—our national economy may be in trouble, the Chinese may be poised to make a move into the Middle East, the Cowboys may be eliminated from the play-offs—but for no second is anything removed from God’s hands. As Christians it may be a good meditation to consider that no matter how bad things seem, the Lord is present, His purposes unthwarted. We can’t see what God is doing—truth is, we never have seen, or at least understood. We’re as clueless as the Lord’s Apostles were when He spoke in parables.

God has given us minds and look at the many great things we’ve accomplished with them. But they—we—I—have limitations. We can and should wrestle with questions ranging from the inner secrets of the tiniest piece of an atom to the circumference of the boundaries of the Universe, but none of those discoveries will bring us any closer grasping the Mind of our Creator. Remember that odd exchange between Moses and God in the Book of Exodus? Moses asks God “show me Thy glory. And God said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee…but thou canst not see My face: for no man see Me, and live. I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with My hand while I pass by: And I will take away Mine hand, and thou shalt see My back: but My face shall not be seen.” We can see the signs of God’s presence and activity in His creation, in where He directs our lives: the unfolding affairs of men, which we imagine are all set in motion by the irresistible forces of history, can never undo what God intends. The Creator of Worlds, Who continually creates and sustains us, the Redeemer of souls, Who became forever one of us so we could one day be like Him, the Sanctifier of all things, Whose power binds all things, this is the One Who invites us to pray.

Our prayer is so anemic because our grasp on the things of the Spirit is so weak.

To lift our hearts and minds to God is not just to “talk to” Him, much less to “think about” Him, as if He were a math problem. We lift our hearts and minds to Him by asking Him to bring us there—and then, waiting patiently, patiently, patiently, patiently for Him to do it—when He decides to. To pray is to put ourselves as His disposal, not vice versa. It’s a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, lifetime decision to pray. Each day’s waiting, each day’s prayer, is built on the waiting and prayer of the day previous.

Sound boring? Better, more important stuff to do? It would certainly seem so. We’ve got stuff to buy, people to impress, business to transact, worlds to build. And someday, before you’ve finished doing all the things you think you have to, you die—and somebody else takes your stuff and puts it in a thrift shop.

Holy Week has a lot of church services attached. The Three Great Days could conceivably use up 4 or 5 hours each, especially if you go to Tenebrae. That’s a lot of time to be in church.

The Apocalypse, the Book of the Revelation, describes the cherubim: “…each of them wrapped in six wings about him; and they are full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, LORD God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.’ ” They forever, with all those eyes, look at God. And their response is to shout, “Holy” over and over and over again, without stopping to take a breath or checking the clock for their break time. They don’t want a break. Every “holy” that they shout is as “fresh” as the first. They’re praying.

You and I aren’t the cherubim, with their powers of sight or concentration. We live day-to-day in our artificial world of garish billboards and cars that are little more than large “boom-boxes” and 24 hour cable news. But do something different this Holy Week. Come out from all the distractions for more than an hour. Go to sing the chants and see the Old Rites made new, where Jesus comes again. Take two and a half-hours and go to your favorite park and don’t bring whatever your customary electronic stuff is. Be quiet. Be alone. Ask God to lift your heart and mind to Him. And wait.

A Blessed Holy Week.