A Child of this Instant

It's been probably more than two weeks since I put up a post on this new blog of mine. I was hoping that starting this blog and giving it a sophisticated first post would inspire me to continually work on my "project" (we all need a "project" in grad school). But I've been setback by my own limitations. I always hope for myself that I become a smart, thoughtful, caring, gentle, and wise person. But my obsession with achieving such a status pulls my focus away from the things in life that really bring me joy, and instead I become envious. I compare myself with others. Oh dear, I compare myself with others so often, to such an obsessive extent.

Comparing usually leads to me feeling poorly about myself. It drags me away from others and from God (whoever God is). But I'm confused as to where else I could put my energies. It's so easy and natural to put energy into comparing myself with others. Where would I put that energy? It's such a natural place for me to focus, I don't know if I could name where my focus would be if it weren't on my internal standards of comparison.

I keep hoping that my practice of meditative prayer will be a new place where positive energy can take hold of me. I'm realizing, though, that I am a very poor meditator (and I hope I say that with honesty and not false modesty). My mantra of "shalom" rarely takes hold for more than a minute before I'm drifting off into fantasies, anxieties, or, predictably, comparing myself with others or some internal standard of my own.

There's really nothing profound entering my mind as how to deal with such personal struggle, though I should certainly name right now that I am not the only one to face these difficulties! But the act of meditative prayer will continue to be a practice of mine, and I trust that will reveal itself as a blessing, though I'm certainly not sure in which way. I'll close with a Rowan Williams quote, commenting on Thomas Merton, which draws close to the heart of both meditative prayer and a prayerful life.

"Being a child of this instant is encountering and entering into that elusive 'there before us' quality of God's action, that active reality- or, indeed, to use the scholastic language which was not at all alien to Merton's thinking, that 'pure act' which is beyond both memory and fantasy, the active 'being' of the world now, in this moment. Religious writing is an open door to what God is doing in making and loving the universe- which of course God does in every moment. Religious writing, writing that is religious work, is part of our attunement to the doing of God, made real and concrete here in how we see and how we attend: a loving and acting, a perceiving without egoistic will, but without passive resignation" (New Words for God).