Putting Our Lives In Order

God is waiting for us in all of our everyday moments. But we need to turn to Him in order to see Him. It's on us. He stands at the door and knocks. If we have a habit of regular prayer, we open the door to Him, and he fills us with his love.

The pressures of the day will command our attention, but if we have a habit of setting aside time for Him, we will give Him more and more of our time, and we will achieve Heaven.

by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael

IF YOU LIKE READ ALONG AS YOU LISTEN:

You can take me to any one of your houses, go to a room. I could walk into that room and move something. It doesn't have to be a large object, just something that you have in that room, and the next time you walked into that room you'd go, "There's something wrong." And for the most part, you would look until you found it, and then put it back where it belongs.

I chose this vestment this morning because it's different from the vestments I usually choose. I usually like the ones with the big collar and everything else like this. You noticed it because it was out of the ordinary.

We live in a world where, engineers particularly, but we live in a structured world. We impose order upon our own world.

One of the areas where we feel like, well, we don't really need to have order... I mean we have order with regard to our family relationships, our work, our house, how we keep our car. We notice these things; they disrupt our lives. But there is a tendency to look at our spiritual lives, our lives with God, and approach it without order. The order that we like to impose upon the world, in areas of spirituality generally becomes, "Well, I don't really know what to do. How do I pray? How do I be spiritual? How do I do all of these things?”

And St. Benedict had a very great rule in his monastic Rule. And I love this quote and it says that, see if I can find the correct page. He wrote his famous rule, "with the moderation in the rule for obedience: Let all follow the Rule as their guide in everything and let no one rashly depart from it."

Now, you see this book? It is called "Ordo", order. This book, if you ever, and I, before I became Catholic especially, and before I was a deacon, you know, watching all these priests and things that they do, and you go, "How in the world do they know what to do on a given day?" It's in a book.

Every Mass, I mean every day when there's a first Mass of the day, first thing Fr. Michael does is he goes to the Ordo. And this Ordo tells me, tells him, every priest in the world, exactly what they are supposed to do.

The Church in itself is very ordered. Drives me crazy. I think it's the Arise group that was here last night, they left off those things that divide people into lines, they put the keys in the wrong place, they disrupted my world completely. They disrupted the order.

So, if our inclination is towards order, and we are looking towards spirituality, how can we use our normal inclination? As opposed to, "Oh I don't want someone to tell me how to do it" and I'm going to pick on Betty just a little bit, "I don't want to do it. God will come to me and give me the spirituality. If he wants me to be spiritual, He's going to come down with, "Zop! You're spiritual."

And the result is, quite frankly Betty, Protestants have a tendency to babble when they pray. "O Lord, I want to thank you for this... and for this... and don't forget this. And by the way, when we're thinking about it, I really want to pray for Betty... Oh and my cousin Ernest, he's having a problem and..." They just go on and on and on. "... and this, and this, and this and this and this." How do you get anything out of it?

If you want to be spiritual, and this is what got me out of bed this morning, is that there is an order to spirituality. And in my life, and in most of your lives, getting up for the 6:30 communion service is a significant order. It is a discipline that we impose upon ourselves.

We'd rather be in bed. Let's be honest about it.

But we feel like, for our relationship with God, we should get up and do it. Because the world just isn't right if we haven't received Our Lord Jesus Christ. So we need to get up and do it.

Similarly, if we want to pray, and we really are in a situation where we want to come closer to God, what do you do?

Well, I know Mayve, she goes and finds a hill where there's a tree at the top of the hill, preferably an oak tree full of leaves. There's a gentle breeze there. And she sits there leaning against the tree, communing with nature because she knows that within nature, God is there. And God is going to know that she is communing with the tree and the grass and nature and all these things and... she falls asleep.

Or does she go, "I really want to put myself in the presence of God. How should I do it? Oh,Jesus told me! 'Our Father, who art in Heaven...'"

Or, I live a life and I just love the blessed Mother. Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe is just so important to me. The rosary is so important. That's when I do the mysteries I come so close to God.

That's a structure. That's an order.

So the tendency is, when you say, "Well, spirituality? Yeah, I'm a spiritual person." "Well, what do you do?" "Well, whatever comes to me."

That's not how you are going to achieve it. You're going to achieve it by having in you spiritual life the same order that you have in your normal life.

I have a project that I need to accomplish at work. I have in my mind the order in which I know I will accomplish it.

But we don't look at the world of spirituality in the same way. "I don't need the order."

And, to the contrary, it is the order that you need.

The order of St. Benedict is eight hours of sleep, eight hours of prayer, and eight hours of hard work. That’s his order.

You come and do, and they're right in here, you do your daily prayers, your night prayers, your morning prayers, the evening prayers. You go to Mass. It tells you exactly what you are going to do. And those things, those prayers, bring you ever closer to God.

So when you are looking at your life, as we all do, and we say, "Well, I want to become more in communion with God. I want to be more with God.” One of the things that you have to keep in mind that, again, St. Benedict so beautifully exemplifies, is the way, many times, to do it. It's the order.

And I'm not saying a particular order. There's so many forms of spirituality you can read about. And what they're reading about is the structure they do.

St. Bernardine, sorry, St. Bernadette, had a very different spirituality from Catherine of Sienna which is a very different spirituality of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, a very different spirituality of John of the Cross.

They're all different. But they all have within them the structure necessary to get to God. And so, if you want a structure, look, it's within the Catholic Church. It's here.

Bring yourself into communion with God but understand. Is there a way? Yes. There are very spiritual, wonderful Protestants who babble when they pray, and they feel in contact with God, but most of us really aren't capable of doing that. We need to have the structure to bring us ever closer to God.

And like I said, from my perspective, and I'm looking at myself personally in this regard, the structure of getting up this early in the morning and coming and listening to a deacon is a discipline very much in the order that we all seek to have our contact with God in the form of spirituality.

July 11, 2019