"Stirred........................"

About two chapters into a Kathleen Norris work entitled “A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life: Acedia & me”, I came across an admission she makes about a place in her earlier years where she was “consuming books rather than reading them”. It was intended as an illustration of just one of the areas where boredom had taken her in her existence, so much in her daily routine seemingly repetitive and without purpose. A page or so afterward, however, she points to those religious recluses within a monastery who claim that the tedium in their never-ending circular course of scheduled tasks and prayers is actually their “way to God”. I am left with an assumption that the brothers, in so defining their efforts, simply speak in terms of such being their means of “connecting with that which Christ has provided”; and, at the same time, find myself considering just how much the human thought process, the sum total of “who-we-are-on-the- inside”, regardless of how one expresses that (there being a variety of choices), plays out in our journey. Spirit? Soul? Heart? The Bible declares that, as Christians, we possess “the mind” of our Savior; and some might see that as our being no more than “like-minded”, our own resolve set to align with His as we determine it for ourselves through the Word. From my perspective, though, I find what He brings to us via the Cross is the Resurrection, the reality of the Holy Ghost, a divine identity with whom we might “go in the way”. His presence is an anchorage, indeed a connection between heaven and earth, a “navigational corrective device” to assist us in our stumble down the path. Ennui and discouragement are merely part of what comes to us when we tend to either dismiss Him altogether, or reduce Him to a set of religious rules designed to make us holy……