CowPi Journal

Breath is as essential attribute of one’s person, whose existence we may only infer through other media: the sight of our chest rising and falling, the sound of air rushing into our sinuses, the disturbance of the atmosphere near our skin. We mentally connect this evidence-of-breath into a coherent whole, and then label it “my breath”. Yet what distinguishes “my breath” from mere air and, further, what distinguishes this breath from my person? (source)

During Communion, I often find myself just watching everyone receive the Blessed Sacrament. I know I should be singing, for singing as Saint Augustine said is twice prayer, and we all are supposed to be in communion during this time. But I cannot help myself. Maybe that is the problem. I don’t know.

Anyhow, I cannot help but watch individuals in the act of receiving the Body of Christ. I dare not judge or label them. I do not know their stories. I do not know their prayers. I do not know their hopes. All I see is their simple and most profound act of faith—receiving, touching, and communing with their God, with my God, with our God.

It is like watching their faith breathe. All I can do is watch and be in awe. Sometimes I just a take it all in. Sometimes I say a simple prayer for each of them, like heal them, or bring them into a deeper relationship with You. I tend to smile with the parents guiding or carrying little children. My heart smiles for the crippled or lame for I know Jesus will make them new and whole. I am amazed at the older folks with worn out bodies and vigorous faith.

Communion with the Eucharist is the Body of Christ breathing. It fills me with awe and gratitude and love.

As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship. Like every apprenticeship, it requires time and effort. He who has reached the end of his training realizes that the differences between things or between events are no more important than those recognized by someone who knows how to read, when he has before him the same sentence reproduced several times, written in red ink and blue, and printed in this, that, or other kind of lettering. He who does not know how to read only sees the differences. For him who knows how to read, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. This does not mean that he will not suffer. Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other.

— Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Teach me, Father, how to read your message of love,
written in the colors of joy and of suffering
within the things and events of life.

Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center.

The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. But through all the horror he can continue to want to love. There is nothing impossible in that, no obstacle, one might almost say no difficulty. For the greatest suffering, so long as it does not cause the soul to faint, does not touch the acquiescent part of the soul, consenting to a right direction.

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

— Simone Weil, Waiting for God

The felt the big emptiness this morning. It actually started yesterday afternoon, but I did not notice or label it as such until this morning. It is not depression. I know depression. It’s close, but not the same. There is no despair, no deep sadness or lowness that comes with depression. It is just an empty feeling, an absence, and a deep sense of loneliness and longing.

At first, I noticed myself trying to cover it up with distractions, listening to music, watching television, doing sudoku puzzles, browsing through a bookstore. These are worthy pursuits in their own way, and in their own time, in moderation of course. There are worse types of distractions to chase after, but regardless of the labels, they are temporary, fleeting, ultimately unfulfilling. The emptiness remains. I can get myself all worked into a frenzy about it with this sense of bubbling negative energy that seeks desperately to be released, as the anxiety builds in a claustrophobic.

Labels can set limits to someone or something, especially ideas. There comes a sense of peace with labeling this feeling—it is not exactly a feeling, not exactly a knowing, but it is the closest word I can find to describe it—an empitness. I cannot define it. The label is just a pointer, a signpost to it. It is not exactly correct either. It is more like a nothingness. How do you describe or define nothingness, emptiness? Only by its outline, its edges, of where it is not, can you attempt to get a handle on it. But that is not exactly correct either, because there are no boundaries to it, to the nothingness, to the emptiness. It seems to permeate everything, as silence permeates and gives existence to every sound.

There is nothing for me to do. I feel a call to just sit with it, to be with it, and stare into it. Oddly enough, I do not expect it to doing anything in return. I do not expect anything to happen. I just want to be with it.

I repeat the prayer from last week’s post:

Do not take away the hunger of my soul
      or let me fill it with spiritual trifles,
      ready to hand, sweet to the taste,
      but good for only a moment’s satisfaction.
Deepen my hunger.
Enkindle my desire.
Come to me in the longing in my heart,
      for in my emptiness you are present.

Maybe this is what Simone Weil meant by “waiting for God”?