Make Yourself Ready

"I will put to you the question my therapist put to me once, which is the same question Jesus put to the lame man by the pool at Bethesda: “Do you want to be healed?”

Of course I do, I said.

No, said my therapist, look deeply within yourself. Because for someone who wants to be healed, you sure are falling back into old patterns of thinking and reacting, patterns that work against your healing.

He was right. I wanted healing, but I did not want to commit my will to the hard work of overcoming barriers between myself and wholeness. I wanted healing to descend like a dove. It rarely happens that way.

You may be given the gift of faith like that. But you have to be prepared to receive it. If your will is predisposed to rejecting faith as incredible, you will find a way to rationalize every manifestation of the divine presence. Hey, I’m a believer, and I struggle with this too. In fact, looking back over what happened to me in the past year and a half, I see that my priest’s decision to impose a strict prayer rule on me was absolutely key. He told me recently that he knew from the beginning that my weakness is living in my head, in the realm of the Ideal. This is how I got myself into trouble by idolizing the Family and the Land, and then by idolizing the Church.

Father Matthew had me pray 500 Jesus Prayers each day. If you pray it in the Orthodox way, you center yourself, and allow no thoughts to enter into your mind. It’s really hard to do at first, but over time, once you get used to it, it gives you an hour each day when you are not thinking, and reacting mentally to what’s around you. It trains you to feel, and to detect the presence of things — even the presence of God — that are always there, but that the busy-ness of your mind prevents you from experiencing.

It was all very subtle, but I see in retrospect how much that helped shake me out of the bind of my rationality. Giuseppe Mazzotta, a Dante scholar at Yale, says that in the end, the Commedia insists that our conversion must be a conversion of the heart, or it won’t be real. The heart is the seat of the will.

If you’re anything like me, faith will be born in you with an experience of awe, of wonder. For Whittaker Chambers, it was awe over the perfection of his infant child’s ear. For me, it was the Chartres cathedral. Who knows what it will be for you? But you have to make yourself ready to receive it. God will not force Himself on you." -- Rod Dreher, The American Conservative