54 Day Novena: Middlemarch

I am nearing the half-way point in the 54-Day Novena.  My petitions have yet to be granted still I prepare to thank God for answering my prayers.  Our anxious hearts search for God – questioning and demanding for His presence to be made known – in prayer God often does not shout to us or appear as a burning bush – God works HIS extraordinary grace in the fabric of life’s simplest wonders.  The gift I continue to receive from daily recitation of the rosary is the gift of God’s restoring peace amid the darkest storms of life.  Meditating on the mysteries of the rosary demands that I quiet my mind and my heart and let God in – not the testing restless spirit of anxious searching – the rosary allows us to quiet our hearts and be still.  It exercises are faith to not expect answers to every question – as much as the quiet resilient trust that God is with us.  Be still in God’s grace.

 

God is always with us – unfortunately so often we overlook HIS grace, his conversation as ordinary measures of coffee cups and hummingbirds.  We lose sight of the majesty and miracles surrounding us – we grasp at demands, hoping for which we can see-frustrated that God is not more visible – only to realize that God is always before our eyes – in the breath of the wind, in the harvest shower and rising sun, life is a symphony to God. 

 

When a person begins to pray – while we hunger for God – we often come to God with petitions, demands, and worries – God wants us to cast all our anxieties on The Holy Trinity – God wants to feed us with HIS Spirit – the problem with only focusing on petitionary prayer is we get so caught up in receiving answers to our prayers in a specific and often times miraculous way we fail to hear God’s voice – His call, and the cues directing us which way to go. 

 

The 54-Day Rosary helps to break down a soul from yearning for God to be an ends to a means to receive things of the world to bridging the gap from the material to the eternal Spirit of Christ and the power of that love.  We begin to reflect on the lessons of our life by studying Christ’s role as teacher, savior and author of creation – Christ’s holiest mysteries are fantastic miracles – yet many of the most poignant miracles are done in simple loving ways – God’s desire and purpose in our creation is for us to love HIM and in loving HIM we start to comprehend that while it is okay to desire the fruits of God’s creation – we must thirst for God.  If we don’t listen and trust to the still silent voice of God’s breath in our lives – we will never be satisfied and we will be faced in the agony of darkness.

 

I find that petitionary prayer, particularly in times of despair is closely akin to Christ’s Agony in the Garden.  He felt betrayed, hurt, fearful of death…the stress causing his sweat to become blood – Christ struggled at this point between the temporal fear based hunger of the worldly security that is passing before succumbing to HIS Father’s will.  Christ knows what it means to be desperate and hungry for God, Christ knows the temptation of wanting to seek comfort in the refuge of the world – but the world is an illusion – the comforts of the world cannot feed a man’s soul and the soul is the essence of man – it is the part we need to fill.

 

Petitioning for twenty-seven days in Rosary form forces us to examine the life of Christ and learn from His joys, sorrows and sufferings and triumph – in Christ we find ourselves both spiritually but also in the humanity of our flesh.  Christ’s life was full of all the complexity, hope, fear, anxiety and tragedy that defines the humanity of our experience on this earth – In Christ and through His disciples we are challenged with philosophical questions and psychology and spirituality – life is found in Christ because he lived and died as fully man and fully divine – and is our negotiator – a bridge from our humanity desiring God.

 

As you age you begin to truly grasp that life in this world is not fair – we are faced with famine, war, drought, flooding, natural disasters, terrorism and countless things to be fearful of.  Still Christ is with us and we should not be afraid.  In the flesh it is easy to question how God can exist so silently when people are starving and crime is rampant – still God is moving through us – in us and for us.  God is always present, always active, always listening – the question is what are we doing for God – are we listening? 

 

I find that the rosary takes the focus off me and puts the focus back on God.  That is not to say God doesn’t want us to talk to Him about our issues – He does – but if we start using God as our punching bag we fail to hear His advice.

 

I’m in a situation now I’m desperate to escape (work-related) and yet every opportunity to leave ends up being a dead end – I have questioned ‘why God’ paradoxically feeling guilty for my frustration because I know others are hurting – and that is a balance we need to question and explore.  God wants to answer our prayers – but he sees the big picture.  Sometimes that means moving people and opportunities into place to ensure the BEST solution.  That is why we can never give up on God when we pray…and the Rosary forces us to look inward to God. In purging ourselves in prayer we discover far greater graces that the gold we sought in our first petition...so when God reveals His answer we know it with trust and may we trust God's action even when it appears invisible to the limits of human sight.

 

Twenty-seven days of Thanksgiving in the Rosary also demands we fully turn over our suffering and worry to God’s care…knowing that even in the darkest of nights – God’s light will ignite the dawn and His stars guide us home.