Thought of the Week –

“IS THERE ANYONE WHO LONGS FOR LIFE?”

Saint Benedict puts these words into the mouth of the Lord, in the Prologue to his famous Rule. However, you do not have to be a Benedictine monk or nun to yearn for life. No. All of us do! It is written into our DNA – even the laziest of us – so, as we desperately struggle to get out of bed in the morning, yawning, stretching and scratching, the great yearning for life is hotting up in us. This yearning and longing, this urge and restlessness driving us to eat and drink, to achieve, to grow, to make love, is like an insatiable pressure inside of us. Mostly it is unconscious, but certainly there.

You can see it clearly in all nature; in plants, for example. In one of his books, Ronald Rolheiser, the Canadian priest, tells of a friend who decided to get rid of a bamboo plant growing in his drive. He cut it down; took an axe to destroy as much of its roots as possible; poured poison on it; then buried it under several feet of gravel, and finally paved over it with thick cement. Quite a job!

Two years later, the pavement heaved as the bamboo plant began slowly to break through the pavement! Some plant, its life force, its blind pressure to grow and reach the light, just could not be thwarted. This power, this energy to grow, is in all living things. If you put a two-inch band of solid steel around a young water melon, as it grows it will, slowly but surely, burst that band of steel. Yet there is more power, yearning and striving for life in you and me, than in any bamboo plant. And if someone put a two-inch band of solid steel around you, somehow you could burst it too.

You can see this yearning for life in babies at the breast, blindly groping for their mother’s milk. You can see it in teen-agers, all agitato with over-active hormones and raging adrenalin. Young people are yearning for life when they get a holiday tan in a cubicle at the Sun Bed Centre! Even drink and drug abuse, and pornography, is fueled by this insatiable urge to be alive. Kicks! Older people who dress like teen-agers; ladies who face-lifts; men who dye their greying hair, or have breast reduction surgery, are all caught up in the urge to be fully alive, and be seen to! But the very best place to answer this yearning, this longing for life and love, is through prayer; simple, regular, daily, persevering prayer, and above all, by taking part in the Mass.

In the Sunday Mass, through the Word of God and the Sacrament of Holy Communion, our present life is not simply affirmed or enriched, but NEW life is given us, God’s won life. At Sunday Mass we can connect with him who “gives life to all living things …” the one who is the “Lord and giver of Life”, the Holy Spirit; the Spirit that raised Christ from death to new life! In the Mass God breathes new life into us; it is like mouth to mouth resuscitation. And the Sacrament of Holy Communion is like receiving a blood transfusion.

How do we know that this is “for real”, that it is not just a nice theory, a concept, a pious idea? How do we know we actually share God’s life; that we are not just existing, or vegetating …? How? That we have the desire, the will and the strength to love and serve the other; and that we do this with freedom, overcoming our selfishness and self-seeking, and that we look for no reward.

Yes, God’s grace – his own life in us – can break through the concrete that sometimes buries us. God’s grace can burst the solid steel band that sometimes constricts us. Pray these words:

“O GOD, FOR YOU I LONG, FOR YOU MY SOUL IS YEARNING.

EVEN MY BODY PINES FOR YOU. ”