Someone said that if you look around you it makes you depressed. If you look inward you get distracted. To be hopeful you have to look up. Of course we realize God is everywhere and not a sky deity, but the analogy of “up” meaning transcendence works.
I experienced this today in a beautiful fashion. I am a co-host on a little TV access show with interviews of Catholic leaders. Today, Fr. Martin Jones, newly appointed minister for hispanic evangelization in the Norwich, Connecticut diocese, and I interviewed an elderly hispanic woman who is a parish leader. Aurora was telling stories of the piety of her parents. She spoke of how on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe her family would ride from their ranch in New Mexico in a carriage drawn by horses 18 miles to the Church. She said the priest never started the Mass until they arrived. As she spoke, first in Spanish, and then in English, her eyes were cast upward with an expression of luminous sincerity.
The sincerity of her faith seemed like such a check-mate to a kind of mildly cynical sophistication we can fall into out of a kind of intellectualization of the faith.
On the verge of falling asleep tonight it was Aurora’s upward glance that remained in my mind as the most significant reality to share with you.
Dr. Ronda Chervin has many free e-books and audios on her website rondachervin.com. If you go to her website and read or listen and then want to correspond with her she will be available. Her schedule does not permit, however, responding to comments on the Blog, though she enjoys reading them. Dr. Ronda’s newest project is spiritualityrunningtogod.com.
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1 Robert Fox says...
Excellent points. I just read recently in one of St. Escriva's works, of his exhortation to a young person in his time… that all Catholics should "remember and recite the prayers that their mothers taught them as little children at bedtime" (exactly as mother taught us). It dovetails with what you are saying here because if we can't pray as little children, then we have lost the whole meaning of being a disciple.
When my mother was teaching me my bedtime prayers, I was always looking up into the eyes of my mother. She may have died a long time ago… but nothing has changed… I'm still looking up into the eyes of my Mother… only now they are together looking at me.
So when I start to get negative by looking around, or distracted by looking inward, I say "Now I lay me down to sleep…". And I also begin to look at the small but very significant signs of springtime (and I'm not referring to the weather outside here).
Ave Maria!
Posted at 3:44 p.m. on April 16, 2011