>I really didn’t want to go to mass this morning at Gethsemani. I went anyway. I woke up with a head full of reasons, good reasons, not to go to mass. It seemed like a slap in God’s face if I were to let those reasons prevent me from standing before God at the Eucharist, as I feel compelled to do, every day. Humans do some of the best creative thinking when searching for reasons not to do something. The first was “I’m tired.” The second was, “I don’t have clothes ready.” The third was a variation on the I don’t want to theme.
I did not want to go. Yet, part and parcel of the spiritual life is to not turn away from my vocation just because of a desire to spare myself some bother or inconvenience. For me, it is part of my conversion of life. And, oh, what a difficult task that is. The first lesson is to stay away from reasons “to not,” when it involves something connected to the conversion of life. As Fr. Michael Cassagram said in his paper “Toward the Formation of LCG Members,”
When the spiritual journey gets rough, prayer is often the first thing to suffer; and yet isn’t it at this moment that we are most in need of divine help and mercy? God asks us sooner or later just how serious we are about the journey.
It is the question of seriousness that demands the examination of every motive in each part of my life. Nothing can be left by the wayside, all must be brought into line with the single hope that I place, without reservation, in God. That hope for conversion requires me to no longer find the negative reason.
