Habitual!

We are discussing the weaving of good, sturdy habits!

Sadly and somehow, the idea of making progress through habits of religious devotion hasn’t always gotten a lot of good press, not even in churches!  Admittedly, it is a lot more fun to talk about being holy than it is to stop eating between meals or to curb our time-wasting. We love the time we throw away!  This we know full well.    

It is a cultural irony that bookstores, cyber and sidewalk, have become jam-packed with the essentials of monasticism!  They don’t call it that, but articles abound purporting to help the harried become harmonized with their own souls and teaching the less-than-productive to start getting things done on the way to getting where they want to go.  Let’s just make note: nuns have been doing all this for centuries!

What’s more, there have been Marketplace Monastics like us from of old, long before Benedict or Francis or the “Desert Fathers.” There is, of course, one critical difference between our monastic steps to success and those that are flying off the bookshelves: the goal we pursue is the likeness of Jesus Christ!

On this lovely morning, as many of us as dwell in the cloister of commitment to our Lord and King, let’s rejoice and give thanks, because the above destination is one that each of us can find.  Here in Cor Unum, our habits are like handrails along the path to His image in us.  They are the "warp" threads without which the "woof" . . . the new word is "weft" . . . threads cannot attach and form the tapestry. We may not be there yet, not fully formed in the Son of God, but we can do anything God tells us to do and go anywhere He sends us.  Before Zimbabwe or Haiti or an inner-city mission, Colossians 3:9-11 tells us that we are to put off our old man, put on the new man, and that person, new as he is, is yet being renewed in knowledge according to the One Who created him!  “Her.”  We are, first and foremost, “sent” into the image of the Son of God!  We are making a habit of walking on that path, and that path alone.

Tomorrow, help from an instructional video!

shefshef, by permission