Re-connecting
This week, since work has been light (well, OK, not light, but no session, meaning I’ve been getting out around 3:30 every day), I have had a lot of time to re-connect with myself and my place, as it was. So I’ve resumed my daily (or almost daily) journaling, my shopping and cleaning, and, of course, my daily prayer routine has gotten a jumpstart.
A “perfect” prayer day would be one that includes the following:
–Morning Magnificat
–Mass or Mass readings from Magnificat
–Rosary
–Bible for the day
–Some spiritual reading (a memoir, Theology of the Body, etc.)
–Evening prayer from Magnificat
–Compline/Night prayer
Now normally I don’t do all those things. Like I said, that’s a perfect day. But today has been pretty good: morning prayer, evening prayer, spiritual reading (Swimming With Scapulars, a memoir by Matthew Lickona, which is also a finalist for the Catholic Summer Reading thing I blogged about a few posts ago…scroll down to see the link). I’ve also read my Bible.
I try not to make it like a “checklist” so that it’s devoid of spirituality and instead becomes a one more thing to do sort of mentality. But it helps if I have a general idea of things I’d like to do, spiritually, in a day.
Fridays (like tomorrow) I try to do things a little differently. I try to avoid eating meat, and I read a meditation from St. Thomas a Kempis’ book on the Passion. It’s odd, our culture sees Friday as a celebratory day; beginning of the weekend, woohoo! But it’s Friday, a remembrance of Good Friday, and so I try to fast/abstain from meat/ focus on that. So it can be an odd conjunction. If I can’t totally avoid meat then I try to avoid it for one meal, like if lunch is meat then dinner isn’t.
