7 - 20 - 17 My Yoke is "Easy"


The Gospel reading for today is Matthew 11:28-30 Link to Daily Readings

“Come to me all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”

This sounds nice, but as soon as one starts to look into Jesus’s teachings it becomes quite clear that he does not mean the kind of rest we were envisioning. He compels us to a very strict morality and tireless labor for the good of others and the Kingdom.

I think the kind of rest he means is almost unfamiliar to us, but we catch glimpses of it. It is not the rest of spending a day on the couch watching a tv marathon, doing absolutely nothing. For in that same passage Jesus says “my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” He makes no promises to free us from our work. Our rest will be from the work that drains us, that defeats who we are as humans. He will give us the work that strengthens, the work that pleases as it demands.

I’d have to believe it’s not too uncommon of a feeling as I’ve had it before. But I think it is that peculiar feeling one gets when doing very hard, but very enjoyable, work such as hoeing a garden or chopping logs with a friend. That feeling of wholeheartedness in one’s activity combined with fellowship. The image that comes to my mind is a bunch of people all strapped to weight sleds (as one would use in athletic training) trudging forward towards a common goal, if not with hands clasped together, with words of encouragement flowing around.

I think physical work is used as a metaphor beyond the fact of its prevalence in Jesus’s time. I think it is a very plain way to understand work, improvement, and strength. We see ourselves grow stronger in our bodies as we put ourselves to work, just as we will grow stronger in Christ if we persist in His teachings.

I finished Miracles yesterday, read The Great Divorce, and now I am starting on The Problem of Pain today. I hope that these will be fruitful for me, but I find them very pleasurable to read for their own sake. Reading about such high and important things seems to lessen the threats in life. Even if thirty minutes of my workout today leaves me breathless and witless, so what? Thinking of eternity helps to broaden my sense of time beyond the moment’s suffering or the week’s inconvenience. Thinking of what is most important serves to broaden my sense of purpose beyond my daily calendar.

I thought I would experience more anxiety as I got closer to being ready to release my album but I feel fine right now. Perhaps that is because I’m still adding material in an effort to get to a better length. Maybe that’s just me stalling. Maybe I don’t actually have any artistic reason for waiting to get to forty minutes for an album rather than thirty. Maybe I’m just scared. Ten songs does seem kind of short to me. And I passed the threshold of a mixtape when I added the eighth song so it’s sort of in a strange in-between place right now. 

I think I’ve decided that football, well sports in general, just aren’t important enough to me to invest 20 hours a week with little hope of any return. I don’t doubt that some weeks in rugby this fall I’ll hit 20 hours once my own personal lifting as well as travel is added in, but all of that will be enjoyable. It will not be a matter of discipline and boredom as four hour practices where I get two reps are.

Obviously I can’t be certain of how I’ll handle the criticism yet but I don’t think it will affect me very much. Realistically, there will probably be less open criticism than I would expect, but probably more mockery behind my back than I’d care to think about. Oh well. The people who will judge me and care so deeply about that kind of thing are not people whose opinions I value highly anyhow. It is, after all, football.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

8 - 11 - 17 Dogs are Better than People? (5 minutes)

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” We are not asked to deny our cravings. Neither are we asked to deny our vices. We are not asked to gain further resolve in the pursuit of holiness in order to deny any of our own weaknesses. We are asked to deny the totality of our current selves in preference for the new self Christ will fashion within us. I’ve written before about how Christ’s call is not just a new moral standard. If it were it would be an impossible one. It seems to me that the Christian vision of discipleship is actually quite different than that of the Jewish, though this is only in my perception and I am quite ignorant of Judaism as it extends beyond the Old Testament. It is less about behaving a certain way than it is about having a certain state of being. All our righteous actions garner some of their value in that they have a tendency to move us closer to the type of being God desires us to be. I’m not saying t
Read more

6 - 23 - 17 Jesus is Smarter than Drake

6 – 23 – 17 Link to Daily Readings This passage contains Jesus proclaiming that He is the only path to the Father, that He is the only method of salvation for all human souls. There probably couldn’t be a more important thing in the universe. In this passage He also says, “I am meek and humble of heart.” Which seems like quite the contradiction when we consider these two ideas together, but we are thinking of our human experience. Jesus does not need to boast, firstly it would not be in his nature, secondly there is nothing he would desire to lay claim to being that He is not. In this passage He is simply telling his disciples about the nature of His ministry, expressing to them the importance of not only Himself, but his teachings. I think this distinction is what makes these statements feel contradictory to each other when they in fact are not. Most other times we have heard someone boast on that level, of being all-powerful or the very, very best at something it is eit
Read more

5 – 1 – 18 The Power of Just Showing Up (4 minutes)

Father Ben Hawley once said to me, “you engineers all are so Type A.” Father Wayne Dziekan once said to me, “where do you get the energy and time to do all these things?” My mother once said to me, “you need to chill out.” Generally, I prize action. I’m very into verifiable improvements, public accomplishments, and third-party validation. I generally think of my self-definition in terms of “to do” rather than “to be.” It’s less about where I am than where I’m headed, less about who I am than what I do, and less about any appreciation of the moment than a constant task of optimization and improvement. But that’s not Saint Peter. “Lord, it is good that we are here.” The thought popped into my head yesterday morning while sitting in the pew after the Eucharist at my first daily mass at Mary of the Assumption in Saginaw. The experience was not altogether underwhelming, but the feelings that made it memorable were not exceptionally religious. I mostly just felt uncomfortabl
Read more