If only...

I often find myself wishing I were able to go back in time and re-live some wonderful time in my life. Typically, this reminiscing takes place during periods of immense spiritual struggle. I long for the cool, calm waters of past journeys in order to soothe the raging storm within. In so doing, I find several things happening. Namely, when I long for the past, my yearning is never fulfilled. It is amazing what I will do in order to return to some mountain peak experience. I will reread books, restate prayers, recall routines. In short, I will do anything to go back and reclaim that period of fulfillment. None of it works. No matter how long I try or how hard I work, it all fails. Thankfully, there are those in our walk with Christ who can help us gain anew a fresh vision and a new experience.

As I was reading C.S. Lewis (a spiritual guide I will be forever thankful to God for) the other day, I found a paragraph or two dealing with just this issue. In this section, Lewis is giving an exposition of the Lord's Prayer. He reaches the part of the prayer that says, "Thy will be done." This is what he says about it: I am beginning to feel that we need a preliminary act of submission not only toward future afflictions but also towards possible future blessings. I know it sounds fantastic; but think it over. It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life - in religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience - we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we're still looking for the old one. And of course we don't get that. You can't, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good...This applies especially to the devotional life. Many religious people lament that the first fervours of their conversion have died away...But were those fervours - the operative word is those - ever intended to last...It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once...And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year's blooms, and you will get nothing. - Letters to Malcolm

Carpe Diem.