This morning I read further in Thomas Merton’s Bread in the Wilderness. He writes about the experience of encountering Christ in the praying of the Psalms. I’ve found it to be a meeting that changes me little by little, like the gentle waters of a stream slowly wearing away the rough edges of a rock to fashion a smooth stone. I’m the stone, of course, and the water is the Word and Action of God, Jesus Christ.

A passage from the reading challenges me. Merton writes:

But at the same time, our growth in Christ is measured not only by intensity of love but also by the deepening of our vision, for we begin to see Christ now not only in our own deep souls, not only in the Psalms, not only in the Mass, but everywhere, shining to the Father in the features of men’s faces” (p. 116).

The challenge comes in the turn towards other people, the move to seeing and receiving and expressing love and charity towards others as the embodiment of my faith in God. It’s the last place of deepening vision—the features of others’ faces—that challenges me.

In a way, this returns me to an insight that led me to begin the journey to become a Benedictine Oblate. I came to realize that while I had received and retained a great wealth of knowledge about the Christian faith, thanks to my education at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, I had really taken very few steps towards growing into a more loving, charitable, and embracing servant of Christ. In short, my life of faith was one lived in the head, but not in the heart. It was a life of orthodoxy with little orthopraxis.

Praying the Psalms daily helps me to take steps along this path of living in ways that make me more charitable towards others, because, as Merton says, ’…[I] begin to see Christ…everywhere, shining to the Father in the features of [others’] faces” (p. 116). The Liturgy of the Hours helps because it is not a plan of my own making, a routine of my own choosing, a message promoting my own biases.

There’s comfort and strength in knowing this practice is not a solitary act. Whenever I open the book to pray the Psalms, I can be sure that somewhere in God’s global Church, someone else is praying the same texts at the same time. It’s like I am the little rock dropped into the stream of God’s Word. I do not choose how the water will wash over me, what parts of me it will polish today.

The Rule of St. Benedict begins with a Prologue, where St. Benedict writes:

Listen, O my son, to the teachings of your master, and turn to them with the ear of your heart. Willingly accept the advice of a devoted father and put it into action. Thus you will return by the labor of obedience to the one from who you drifted through the inertia of disobedience. Now then I address my words to you: whoever is willing to renounce self-will, and take up the powerful and shining weapons of obedience to fight for the Lord Christ, the true king (Prol. 1-3, Terrence G. Kardong, trans., Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary, p. 3.).

My prayer is that I may listen with “the ear of [my] heart” to all that God says to me and that he will make my heart soft and loving toward him and all others around me. Today, like every other day, I awaken and begin anew.

Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus.