Create in me a clean heart

I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your impurities, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts. I will put my spirit within you and make you live by my statutes, careful to observe my decrees.

Ezekiel 36:25-27

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 (today on Sunday) as part of that. The meme is based on the Examen as practiced by St. Ignatius of Loyola. This time around, since I haven’t been here since the beginning of the month, I’m going to look back at the entire month of September. I’m using the above Scripture for my questions.

Where this month have I had a stony heart in that I have not been receptive to either discerning or doing God’s will?

1. The computer: As a person with only a part-time job and more than a little bit of free time on my hands, I constantly stay up too late, frittering away time on applications such as Facebook or blip.fm, an application where you can be a deejay of  your own musical tastes and connect with other like-minded individuals. I know this doesn’t help me in either sleep or more importantly in my quest for finding a full-time job. Also it is not that the applications are evil in themselves; it’s just the excessive amount of time that I spend on each and the lack of self-control to limit my activities on each that is distracting me from doing things I should be doing.

2. WeightWatchers: I signed up for WeightWatchers online last month. Since then, it seems like it’s been all downhill. I haven’t used the tools there for tracking food or exercise, the latter which I haven’t done unless one counts walking to town for errands, which I don’t. You may notice that I don’t mind giving a link to WeightWatchers, because it is a program that has worked for me in the past, whereas I didn’t leave any links to Facebook or blip.

Where this month have I had a natural heart in that I have been receptive to either discerning or doing God’s will?

1. Volunteering: I volunteer at a house beside our church called Samaritan House, where people come to die. This past month, although I only was there twice for a guest who had lung cancer, I feel like it helped alleviate the burdens on his wife, even if for a couple of nights. She had been staying with him the entire time he was dying, and needed a little sleep. I was glad to be able to afford her that, as I took night shifts from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. for two nights. He passed away last week, and a memorial service is planned for next month.

2. Reading spiritual books: Specifically, I want to point out a book called Befriending Our Desires by Philip Sheldrake, S.J. (Society of Jesuits), which I’m borrowing from my spiritual director.

Most people find it hard to believe the words “desire” and “spirituality.” Desire seems inescapably linked wi th the world or viewed in strictly physical terms.

Yet many of the great spiritual writers and teachers used desire as a central metaphor for the human search for God or emphasized the importance of befriending our desires to spiritual growth and to discernment.

In this thoughtful and innovative work, Philip Sheldrake explores the intimate association between spirituality and desire– both “ours and God’s.” He invites his readers to reflect on the nature of human desire in relation to prayer, discernment, and spiritual growth as he mines the rich Christian spiritual tradition that addresses “desire,” “yearning,” or “longing” in the human search for God– “indeed in God’s reaching out toward humanity.”

…In Befriending Our Desires, Sheldrake shows that desire is indeed a key to the spiritual journey; for only by attending to our deepest desires can we encounter our deepest selves– the image of God within us.

– from the back of the book

I will try to share more from this book, as I continue to read it throughout this next month. I am also continuing to read Chip Ingram’s book, Good To Great In God’s Eyes: Ten Practices Christians Have In Common, as mentioned in my Flashback Friday earlier this month.

3. Continuing to list during each week’s Mass a response to the following: “God show me the one way in this Mass I can become a better person this week.” This was something suggested in a talk by Matthew Kelly, a Catholic lay minister, called “The Seven Pillars of Catholic Spirituality.” I confess (to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters , that I did miss one weekend’s Mass, but I did write down a brief thought on each of the other three weekend Masses, including this past weekends.

I share them here and now in that they may (or may not) be useful to you as well. Sept. 6: Love is cash-, color-, and class-blind. Sept. 20: Giving in to God’s will is the key to a peaceful life/When we make someone else No. 1, we find Christ. Sept. 27: What are we doing to heal the divisions that we have caused, or others have caused in our lives?/When Jesus Christ is present, anything, anything, anything can be healed.

Although this song is from a different Scripture than the one above, I think it is one that fits with this post (plus it highlights one of my favorite Christian contemporary musicians):

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.