For some time now I have been thinking of ending entries to this blog. Two reasons seem to urge this. First, no one is reading it –except me –though my posts have been out there hanging in cyberspace for ten years, as of now some three-hundred of them. Reason two: I have been bothered by my lack of focus. With a website named “Resurrecting Chicago” I have just gone on treating the site as a file cabinet full of my latest ideas about spirituality and about anything in life that interests me that day.
I have been blessed and cursed by having interest in everything from St. Augustine’s path to finding God to a rant on why people allow –even encourage — their little pooches to piss proudly on any green lawn. So, it’s no surprise that this blog is a shopping bag full of random things with no focus or organization.
The time has come to admit that my reader is still worth it. I’ll write for him because where else will I file ideas? So, here I go again.
I am on retreat at Mundelein searching for more ways or deeper ones of experiencing God. Father Mike just finished with a talk on experiencing the presence of God within. That’s right! Not outside of me but within. He based this talk on an experience he had when his nephew began to attend an evangelical church. The high school student loved the Catholic Church but he ended up experiencing God is a more personal way. He had never heard before the concept that God is within us. He isn’t outside of us in heaven waiting to pounce on us at the first sin. No, He lives with us and wants the best for us.
Father Mike continued with recommending a small book called “The Practice of the Presence of God,” by Brother Leonard of the Resurrection.
Father Mike told us a story of how he worked in a factory where he unpacked radios from a large container filled with the product and then each radio was individually boxed for retail store sales. Bor-ing! The radios never changed, all the same. He complained to a co-worker about the repetitive moves and asked her how long she’d been working there. “Oh,” she said, “about six years.” He asked her how she managed to do the same thing hundreds of times a day for all those years.
She said, “For me it’s easy. Every time I box one of these radios I say a prayer for the person who will own it . So, it never gets boring because each radio that leaves my hands goes out with a different prayer. See?
Our days, routine or not, are, in the end, whatever we make of them. The practice of the presence of God is the key to successful daily living.