Numbering My Days: How the Liturgical Calendar Rearranged My Life by Chene Heady

Author:Chene Heady [Heady, Chene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681497112
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-07-08T05:00:00+00:00

Tuesday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

(1 Pet 1:10-16)

Saint Peter today (1 Pet 1:10-16, the second reading) tells us that we need to be trained for heaven. We need to be conditioned to live the spiritual life. This could seem paradoxical. If God made us for heaven and for the things of the spirit, how can they seem foreign to us?

Heaven is our ultimate end, but as fallen creatures we don’t simply take to it naturally. We have to change our mental hard wiring, so that we no longer think and feel according to “the desires of [our] former ignorance” (14). Physical strength is perhaps an analogy here. We naturally possess a potentiality for physical strength, but unless we activate it through a rigorous (and by no means natural or intuitive) process of training, it will never be actuated. I know that I certainly never have actuated whatever physical strength I possess and that exercise never ceased to feel weird, foreign, and basically stupid and boring to me. Exercise is thus at once supremely natural and entirely artificial. Peter asks us to imagine the spiritual disciplines in similar terms, as types of training by which we may “gird up the loins of [our] mind” (13). By awkwardly doing the same thing over and over, a person gradually becomes natural at it and even develops muscle memory so that it feels wrong not to do it. We habituate ourselves into the life of the spirit; we acculturate ourselves into heaven.

As banal as it is, and as scatological as it sounds, the biggest event in my life in recent weeks has been potty training Beatrice. It’s hard to figure out how one learns—or teaches—an automatic process. Beatrice runs pantless through the house yelling, “I don’t want to sit on the potty!” Then Beatrice misses her pink princess potty and poops on the ceramic tile. Finally, she sits on the potty—but produces no material product.

Yet, once Emily institutes a program in which every time Beatrice potties successfully, she receives a sticker to place on a piece of pink construction paper taped over the toilet, everything suddenly changes. As an added incentive, we also decide to give her an M&M—in the color of her choice—each time. “Bea did it! Yeah for Bea!” Bea now yells. And we reinforce the result with a weird little call and response:

“Who pottied on the potty?”

“Bea pottied on the potty.”

“Who’s gonna get a sticker?”

“Bea’s gonna get a sticker.”

“Who’s gonna get some candy?”

“Bea’s gonna get some candy.”

This is an apt, if degrading, analogy for the spiritual life. God blesses us in external ways that we can comprehend—job, spouse, friends, and so on—to reach us where we’re at by talking to us in our own terms. We need tangible blessings so we can begin to want to internalize what God is teaching us, even before we fully share his values. But the goal is to end up entirely elsewhere, somewhere where those terms would be without meaning. The real rewards are those which in our current frame of reference we couldn’t even conceive.

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