Share any reflections on our Week 2 readings and exercises here.
I will just comment that I feel that my efforts were “too muscular”, and produced poor results. I will go back to Simone Weil and try to let my exercises be ruled by desire rather than force. I will try to be more like the robin who stares intently at his prey, unmoved by distractions, than like the sparrows that scatter away at the smallest disturbance.
Response to Questions on the Transfiguration Icon – Week 2 Forum:
- I printed out a color copy of the icon, and at first experienced resistance; it seemed too complicated, but also a real curiosity because I had never imagined that Gospel scene depicted in such a way. Next I applied an “effort of the will” to analyze or proofread it; trying to understand it in words, noticing the details – the flowing water, the two cutouts in the mountain showing Jesus and the two apostles going up the mountain on the left, and descending it on the right. Finally I sat back and began just to “look”; I found my eyes drawn directly to the Christ figure.
- One apostle (Peter?) is looking at the lower garment of Christ and gesturing, perhaps making his offer to build three tents. The other two are cowering, afraid to look. Moses and Elijah seem attentive, looking directly at Christ, but not afraid. Is Peter “striving after goodness with an effort of the will”?
Turning my attention from evil to perfect purity has been a great ongoing exercise for me this week. (Meditation, fasting, the Jesus Prayer, and other practices suggested here are helping.) I don’t do great at it: I get very caught up in my “emotional programs” (cf. Intimacy with God, Keating). I habitually mistake in-the-moment emotion and thought – justified anger or hurt, or pride or happiness, for instance – for Perfect Purity. My hope is that turning my attention to Perfect Purity will help me be more present with the One who is perfectly present. This exercise has already been an antidote to my will to power. I am eager to keep working at this.
I will be meditating on this: “It is however [when I am in a bad mood] that the act of looking is almost impossible. All the mediocre part of the soul, fearing death with a more violent fear than that caused by the approach of the death of the body, revolts and suggests lies to protect itself” (193, emphasis added).
St. Joseph the Just, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Guardian of the Redeemer, pray for us. (I heard in a reflection today that to be just, biblically-speaking, is to be perfectly open to the will of God.)
The excerpt from Simone Weil’s Waiting for God; the Love of Religious Practices has, [page 195], a Latin line about God seeking man, “Quaerens me sedisti lassus”. I looked up a translation, and I found this article about it in Commonweal magazine:
The hymn was dropped from funeral Masses after Vatican II, and I wonder how familiar it is to most Catholics today.
My wife’s phone case is the Dies Irae. Not something she created, it was just commercially available. (Though it might have been from etsy. In which case, commercially available might be overstating) I wonder, have any other hymns been made into an iPhone case?
