Today I was able to go to morning Mass. The Living Word of God I have held in my heart is Ps. 94 12:
"Blessed the man you instruct, O LORD,
whom by your law you teach."
I have been noticing all the more lately, how the Lord has been guiding me, directing me in specifics and in general. He teaches and instructs; he shows me His Divine Will and chooses my path. By God's law, He teaches me. God gives me rest from evil days.
After Mass, driving back to Solus Deus Hermitage, I told the Lord that if my eternity would be like Mass--even not a super deep mystical ecstasy--I would be thrilled and grateful to spend forever in perpetual Mass.
The priest's sermon focused on Mark 8:14-21. How difficult it is for us to understand, to grasp and perceive, the deeper meanings, the spiritual views and levels of understanding that Christ wants us to understand and by which to grow in holiness and in union increasingly with Him. We humans tend to think so literally, so temporally. Jesus tried to explain to His disciples various spiritual truths, but they yet struggled to grasp, to be able to take their minds beyond temporal, beyond the here and now.
Thus, Jesus would ask, "Why do you conclude that it is because you have no bread? Do you not yet understand or comprehend? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes and not see, ears and do not hear? And do you not remember, when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many wicker baskets full of fragments you picked up?" When the disciples answered Jesus the literal numbers of how much was left, they still seemed not to understand His point.
Jesus had been trying to teach them to warn them, to "Watch out, guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod." He was wanting them to rise beyond the temporal snares and the mindsets that cannot think spiritually, mystically, symbolically, the divine--to think beyond the here and now, not remain stuck in the literal, the legalistic and rule-oriented structured, the human senses only. Even when he asked again, and they could only respond literally, "He said to them, 'Do you still not understand?'"
During the day, between rest in bed and trying to remove a large mirror glued to the St. John the Baptist Bathroom wall, I prayed for courage to deal with what was going to be a harrowing and treacherous task, given how mirror glass shatters not in chunks but in sharp shards. I had instructions of some techniques to try, in order to get the mirror to come apart in safe pieces, by scoring the mirror and then taping over the score lines, and then tapping with a hammer on a block of wood. That did nothing.
Then I tried the technique of using Duck Tape cross-wise and back and forth and up and down on the mirror, then hitting it directly and fairly hard with a hammer in various places. I wore a full face shield, leather gloves, overalls, long sleeved shirt and stood to the side as best I could. Then I used pry bar from one side and tried to get the mirror--pieces of glass shattered but sticking to all that Duck Tape, to separate away from thew all where it has been securely glued for the past 25 years.
Gradually, the mirror began to roll and drop, all that Duck Tape keeping most but not all the glass shards stuck to the tape. Finally, with using the pry bar to poke and pull at the massive mirror, in pieces, and the tape holding all together like a heavy drapery of sharp and broken glass, fell with a thud in a mound, upon a tarp I had on the floor and covering plumbing water lines.
Then began the equally treacherous and back-bending, painful task of picking up the mound of glass tuck to tape; I could not lift that, of course. I brought up a trash can and laid it on its side, and did my best to shove the mound into the trash can, then leverage it upright. TGod instructs here still remained oodles of shards on the tarp and some had shattered and sprayed in other areas of the gutted bathroom. The face protection shield and the clothing, as especially the heavy, leather work gloves made the task safer and ultimately successful.
Of course, it was too heavy a task, even though I put some of the shards into a box that I taped shut and put in trash bin in garage, and I split the other into two doubled, heavy-duty trash bags and heaved them into the trash bin, also. I did not want the trash men to be injured when the bin would be dumped into the truck on trash day pick-up. My spine is cranky with pain tonight, but the day has been one of the Lord instructing me in various ways, including that of inner peace and the value of inner peace, and in affirming I do not need to be approved as I am His hermit, His nothing, His poor, gray dove, His suffering victim of love and offering who had but one nick from glass that must have gotten into the right hand glove. (I don't think that qualifies as having "suffered unto blood!")
But here is this commentary by St. Gertrude of Helfta (Gertrude the Great) in her desire for God to take her into Himself, as she so wished to comprehend as He does, to understand in ways He desires her to understand. This sentence form the saint seems to capture a lovely connection between understanding and the Trinity, with my task today (that an able-bodied person could have done in less than a half hour, but it took me off and on the bulk of the day, between bed rest and the added trip to the store nearby to get Duck Tape).
"You are the bright mirror of the holy Trinity that, there above, we are permitted to contemplate with the eye of a pure heart (Mt 5:8), but here only obscurely."
God bless His Real Presence in us! Lord, please help us understand as you do, all matters of earth and those of heaven, more clearly and less obscurely.
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