All We Need for the Journey

For one reason or another, I saved a Magnificat meditation by Dorothy Day. Her words appear in purple.

Today the atmosphere is very heavy. Rain threatens. So often one is overcome with a tragic sense of the meaninglessness of our lives—patience, patience, and the very word means suffering. …

My weather differs significantly from the atmosphere Dorothy was experiencing. How about my inner world, though? Is it rain-filled and cloudy or as sunny as the sky out my window? I guess, if I’m being honest (and why wouldn’t I, here and now?) “partly sunny” is the best way to describe it. My peace is intact, overall, but a few recent negatives have me searching my soul a little more carefully than usual.

One must keep on reassuring oneself of these things. And repeat acts of faith. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. We are placed here; why? To know him and so love him, serve him by serving others, and so attain to eternal life and joy, understanding, etc. …

As I showered and dressed this morning, the dialogue in my head revolved around seeing life as a game. I still contend that such a strategy is key to spiritual growth and spiritual peace for me. What’s more, it preserves it for others, and as I read every morning: “Acquire a spirit of peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved.” In my head today, I worked at better defining the game itself: how it works, the goal, the rules, the strategies, and what I realized is that I’m not trying to beat someone, to come out the winner, the one with the most toys or the greatest material reward. The payoff of the game is, quite simply, peace. When I am playing well, the peace suffuses my mind and my heart. I am able to shrug off slights and smile at the petty ways of others, knowing that they are their problems, not mine.

When I am playing the game well, I steer conversations in the directions that will keep me safe and others happy. My real thoughts stay hidden away in my head, and—knowing that others will not understand because they are not ready to—I am able to resist the temptation to explain and teach and share what I have observed or figured out. Most importantly, when I am on it, I am easily able to resist telling anyone else, “You’re doing it wrong.”

Some might see my game-playing ways as manipulation. Go ahead. I won’t try to stop you, but not because you’re right, but because it’s likely that little I could say or do will change a mind unwilling to be changed. I will simply say this: it’s awfully hard to carry on a conversation with someone who shuts you out because you’ve said the wrong thing or said it in a wrong way: and yes, I have plenty of experience to back myself up on this one.

We know how powerless we are, all of us, against the power of wealth and government and industry and science. The powers of this world are overwhelming. Yet it is hoping against hope, and believing in spite of unbelief, crying by prayer and by sacrifice, daily, small, constant sacrificing of one’s own comfort and cravings—these are the things that count.

I read Day’s words so differently now than I would have three years ago, and I wonder how much she really knew about the way the world works. Yet, it is her line about hope and belief that captures my attention. The Christian life, remember, is one of hope, and yes, that makes all the difference, generates all the meaning.

And old as I am, I see how little I have done, how little I have accomplished along these lines.

Is this false modesty from a woman who touched thousands of lives, worked tirelessly to feed and clothe the poor, or is it a realistic assessment? Few, if any, are called to change the world in one fell swoop, but we are all called to do what we can in each of our tiny realms. The real question is: how many of us are listening or even hear the phone ringing?

One time I was traveling and far from home and lonely, and I awoke in the night almost on the verge of weeping with a sense of futility, of being unloved and unwanted. And suddenly the thought came to me of my importance as a daughter of God, daughter of a king, and I felt a sureness of God’s love and at the same time a conviction that one of the greatest injustices, if one can put it that way, which one can do to God is to distrust his love, not realize his love. God so loved me that he gave his only begotten son. If a mother will forget her children, never will I forget you. Such tenderness. And with such complete ingratitude we forget the Father and his love!

She’s right; we do forget, but I have to wonder how much of this forgetting comes about because so few around us take the time to remind one another. Since the greatest way to show our love for God is by showing it to others, shouldn’t we be working a little harder to find common ground and spend our time letting others know (in one little way or another) how important they are? Yes, I have chosen to see my world as a game board, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t care about those playing along with me. After all, if other players get knocked out of the game, I end up in a round of solitaire.