Jan 13., 2009   /   Soul Food

Back To The Basics

New year is always a good time to begin something new.  It is not a severance of the past though, but a continuation.  I like to see my journey not as a straight line but a spiral going up.  What better way to prepare for the coming year than by reviewing my planner and journal entries to know how I have spent the months, days, minutes and hours of the past year.  I find it so ironic that my days were packed with significant experiences yet I felt that the days have gone by so swiftly.

How did life become complicated? This has been a favorite refrain.  All the necessary introspection in novitiate formation can be a dizzying and nauseating emotional roller coaster ride but I realized that I have had a hand in complicating my own life – the whys, the shoulds and the what ifs that I stubbornly would not let go of.

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“Only the simple are free.”  I guess I have forgotten this, thus, I felt that the call for me this year is to go back to the basics, to simplify –  to go back in order to move forward.  When questions are unanswered, when sufferings seem meaningless, when I cannot understand what God wants I just have to surrender to the reality that God is God, that I am creature and He Creator.  The new beginning then is a new awareness of self and of the realities around me.

It is a matter of shifting perspectives.  It is not as easy as changing eyewear though, but it is God’s grace that makes everything possible.  Sometimes it helps me to look at the evening sky – the moon and the stars, and see how infinitesimal I am in comparison yet God continues to personally seek me out.  <em>What is man that You should spare a thought for him, mortal man that You should care for him?</em>( Psalm 8 )

The best gifts I received last year are not tangible things but intangible treasures that enrich my heart and my soul, not temporary things but things that last beyond a lifetime.  Indeed the best things in life are free.  When we see life from God’s perspective we are able to truly rejoice over this.  And so my prayer for the new year would be simplicity of heart that I may be more noticing and discerning of God’s gifting of himself every moment.  That I may not only see Him as the glorious all-powerful King that He is but may also receive Him as Jesus who humbled himself to be human like us, and was born in a manger in the little town of Bethlehem.

P.S.  This year I began with something new.  Together with my community we prayed over our clocks and watches, calendars and planners. I’d like to share some lines from the prayer we used which you might also find helpful for beginning your new year, taken from Prayers for the Domestic Church by Edward Hays:
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<em>Bless our clocks and watches, You who kindly direct us to observe the passing of minutes and hours. <br><br>
May they make us aware of the miracle of each second of life we experience. <br><br>
May these our ticking servants help us not to miss that which is important, while  You keep us from machine-like routine.<br><br>
May we ever be free from being clock watchers and instead become time lovers…<br><br>
Bless our calendars, these ordered list of days, weeks and months, of holidays, holy days, fasts and feasts – <br><br>
All our special days of remembering… May they remind us of birthdays and other gift-days  as they teach us the secret that all life is meant for celebration and contemplation…
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Sr. Yna Onate, nc