He concludes that not thinking of God has become as difficult as getting in the habit of thinking of Him in the first place, "I am come to a state wherein it would be as difficult for me not to think of God as it was at first to accustom myself to it". That was the sentence that especially stunned me. We are finite humans! We are incapable of thinking of anything for very long, let alone God for eternity. This is beautiful but again impossible.Having found in many books different methods of going to God, and divers [sic] practices of the spiritual life, I thought this would serve rather to puzzle me than facilitate what I sought after, which was nothing but how to become wholly God's. This made me resolve to give the all for the all; so after having given myself wholly to God, that He might take away my sin, I renounced, for the love of Him, everything that was not He, and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world.
And then...I see a glimpse of my life. I can spend a week consumed with my Language Adaption class. I can spend a month worrying over my best friend. I can talk for a year (I don't even need to stop for food; mastered the art of talking and eating long ago). I can spend a lifetime thinking and living for myself. But after half an hour on my knees, I start to squirm. The ability is there. The issue is thinking about God continually means not thinking about myself. To pray without ceasing means ceasing that which isn't prayer. Being more like Christ means being less like myself.
And that is where the impossibility appears again. "I" can't be less than myself because all "I" will ever want is to be more of me. To choose you is to kill the self that chose you. So this must be you, O Christ. It must be all you in all of me. "I" do not have the will to surrender my will. And in finding myself totally unable and completely unwilling, in seeing myself for what I am and what I can never be, I can more clearly see You and what You will always be.
"To pray without ceasing means ceasing that which isn't prayer."
ReplyDelete-In that case the trick is turning whatever isn't prayer into kinds of prayer, otherwise it would be physically impossible.
"And that is where the impossibility appears again. 'I' can't be less than myself because all 'I' will ever want is to be more of me."
-I can see why you like philosophy- you're good at it! I'll push what you said a little further: you also can't ever be less than yourself at all, because if you were, it's YOU that would be less than yourself, and that's absurd ("two is less than two"- what?). You can't be more than yourself either, for the same reason. Jesus seemed to have managed, though- John 1:14