It hit me hard!
When the youth choir sang as their opening song at the 5 PM Mass to kick off Catholic Schools’ Week:
Jesus, in the morning,
Jesus, in the noontime,
Jesus, when the sun goes down!
I knew that was what I wanted! Jesus to be with me during my last years – when the sun goes down! It was such a deep yearning – such a sudden realization – that the tears flowed in relief.
I have been feeling my age lately – with cataracts, lack of stamina, an uncertain step. And I thought of what Fr. Eugene A. Walsh said in his little 28-page book Catholic Adult discusssions 5. Prayer that I had skimmed while doing inventory of our church library:
I had read and appreciated a book about meditative prayer but contemplative prayer was not for me. It required an other-worldly devotion that was beyond me. The definition scared me. Walsh said “The energy of contemplative prayer is twofold: it is primarily the energy of God making a free gift of Godself to us. Secondarily, it is our response to that gift.”
But Fr. Walsh said that contemplation was not something to be sought but something we should be open to when it hit us: “There really are no special requirements. All we need is to be reasonably human and reasonably open. And we need to be able to identify the experience when it happens, so that we can give ourselves over to it.”
Perhaps this was an early experience of contemplation for me.
You might like to check Fr. Walsh’s book out of our library. Or one of the many other books we have on prayer.
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