Flashback Friday: Becoming an oblate

During the bombing raids of WWII, thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. The fortunate ones were rescued and placed in refugee camps where they received food and good care. But many of these children who had lost so much could not sleep at night. They feared waking up to find themselves once again homeless and without food. Nothing seemed to reassure them. Finally, someone hit upon the idea of giving each child a piece of bread to hold at bedtime. Holding their bread, these children could finally sleep in peace. All through the night the bread reminded them, “Today I ate and I will eat again tomorrow.”

Linn, Dennis et. al, Sleeping with Bread

Each Monday, a small group of ladies participate in the meme Sleeping with Bread, started by Mary-Lue and based off the book and on the Friday before that, I post something I call Flashback Friday as part of that. As Mary-Lue describes it in her introduction, just as “the orphans held on to what nourished them and were thus able to sleep peacefully at night, the examen, based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius [of Loyola], helps a person hold onto what spiritually nourishes him by looking at what is giving him consolation in his life or causing him desolation. It allows someone to express his gratitude to God for the good stuff and turn to him for solace for the bad stuff.”

For what am I most grateful?

This week I am most grateful for:

1. the opportunity to go to Mt. Savior Monastery near Elmira, N.Y. this weekend where I am becoming an oblate (explanation here).
2. consolidating a few of my blogs here at an unfinished person (in an unfinished universe) as described here, here and here, while also keeping the other three blogs alive with crossposts. My wife is (and my readers too probably are) confused by all the changes I’m constantly making on my blogs, but I feel that this latest one is the last one and will enable me to help fulfill my mission here: to share about the three elements of who I am, but who we all are, i.e. body, mind and soul. The hope is that not only I can learn something valuable through my own experiences for my own benefit, but also others can learn something valuable through those experiences for their benefit.
3. meeting with my spiritual director yesterday, who discussed this cyclical process through which I go of revising the setup of my blogs over and over again and asked me if I ever brought any of this psychology to God in prayer. The answer is no, and maybe this weekend I can work on that, if that is the direction God wants to take me.

Least grateful?

This week I am least grateful for:

1. neither cleaning my office nor other parts of the house, particularly keeping up with the dishes. I work part-time as a correspondent for a newspaper, which I can do from home and am home most days. It is now almost 2 o’clock in the afternoon (having just got back from an appointment) and I still have to grab lunch and would like to write the story so it’s out of the way before the weekend.  I have to leave to get my wife at 4:30 so I don’t believe I’m going to get the cleaning in. Argh!
2. not making it to Mass last Sunday. My wife, who is an EMT, had a call right before church, and I allowed that to give myself an excuse not to go to church either. For some reason, I didn’t feel like going and just went with that feeling. Especially in light of going to Mt. Savior this weekend, I felt bad the rest of this week for not attending Mass.
3. Overextending myself and committing to read too many blogs in a week when I don’t have the time to do so. It would be more honest of me, if I just stuck to a handful of favorites and leave it at that, instead of trying to read so many blogs and theoretically please (because in many cases I don’t know even know if they care if I read their blogs or not) so many people.

Also along with that last one, last week I didn’t participate in the Sleeping with Bread group and I wanted to comment on Lamont’s post but didn’t until late in the week (going to do that right now to let her and the other know that I will return this week on a more regular basis).

So here’s to a new week and a new commitment, which hopefully I will continue to keep.

This post also can be found at my spiritual blog, Journeying with the Saints. If you only are interested in spiritual-related posts, you can subscribe only to that blog, if you so choose.