The Unworthy Saint

You can no more comfortably dwell in a house full of things you hate than God can live in a heart full of sin. Confession is housecleaning and good works are replacement furniture for God’s dwelling place.

When it comes to prayer, the faithful and the faithless both have a good chance of receiving what they expect.

I went to the TJ Hartford’s Grill & Bar in Lewisville, Texas Saturday night. I recently posted about being careful of what you expect because it can make a difference as to what you experience. I suppose I should’ve heeded my own words on that one and came in with no expectations.

TJ Hartford’s web site sells the place as a fun atmosphere with 5 cent arcade games and decent food. Well, the food I got (the chicken alfredo pizza) really wasn’t all that great. The game room was small and packed with kids. Kids standing on the games, in front of the games, hanging from the games – I’m not even joking. It was chaos. Even if you had a nickel, you wouldn’t have been able to get to the games for all the kids in the way.

For me, as a 24 year old male, TJ Hartford’s Grill & Bar had nothing for me really… The food is better at Chili’s or Two Rows (chicken alfredo pizza) and the game rooms are bigger and better and Chuck-E-Cheese or Dave & Busters. I was thoroughly unimpressed. The only redeeming fact was the people – who were nice.

Food: B
Atmosphere: C+
Service: A

“I say again, let us enter into ourselves. The time presses: there is no room for delay; our souls are at stake. I believe you have taken such effectual measures, that you will not be surprised. I commend you for it, it is the one thing necessary: we must, nevertheless, always work at it, because not to advance, in the spiritual life, is to go back. But those who have the gale of the HOLY SPIRIT go forward even in sleep. If the vessel of our soul is still tossed with winds and storms, let us awake the LORD, who reposes in it, and He will quickly calm the sea.”

-Brother Lawrence

“All things are possible to him who believes, they are less difficult to him who hopes, they are easier to him who loves, and still more easy to him who practices and perseveres in these three virtues.”

-Brother Lawrence

Read The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence now. Seriously, go now.

“That he had desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and so he should sacrifice to GOD his life, with its pleasures: but that GOD had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but satisfaction in that state.”

Be careful not to limit life through definition of experience – whether physical statement or mental expectation.

The example would be not expecting to see a friend at the local supermarket, so even when they’re only 10 feet away, you don’t see them because your mind doesn’t count their being there as a possibility. But this can work through life in many different way. I think sometimes we don’t give God room to work because we have “tied His hands” through our lack of faith.

Per a conversation with my mom, I realized one of the saddest memories I have is of my dog in his final days. This is slightly troubling as the implications are: human life doesn’t matter as much as an animal’s life to me. How do I go about adopting the children of the world into my heart? How do I start feeling for them as much as, or more than, I have felt for animals.

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde is a clear night’s sky, the surf crawling over my feet at sunset, a day spent watching animals running and jumping and frolicing, the gleam of the winter’s sun on the surface of a winter’s snow… De Profundis is, among other things, a rare and poetic picture of Christ which isn’t found in any other human words I have encountered.

Needless to say, it’s worth reading.

The setup is: “Although married and the father of two children, Wilde’s personal life was open to rumors. His years of triumph ended dramatically, when his intimate association with Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality (then illegal in Britain). He was sentenced to two years hard labor for the crime of sodomy. Wilde was first in Wandsworth prison, London, and then in Reading Gaol. During this time he wrote De Profundis (1905), a dramatic monologue and autobiography, which was addressed to Alfred Douglas.” – Read more of his online biography here.

“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.”

-Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

(emphasis added by me)