Daily Reading for October 12 • The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
I can respond to all the myriad small demands each day presents only if I never stop moving. I can hold chaos at bay only by breaking each moment into as many pieces as possible, hoping almost desperately that there will be enough to go around, that I can spread myself thin enough to cover it all. Sometimes it feels not only as though time and strength and order are steadily eroded, but that somehow I am diminished as well; sometimes I feel myself disappearing.
It was at the Eucharist that an insight was given me that may help in my struggle against the entropic forces that regularly disintegrate my life.
As I watched, the priest cast a practiced eye over the congregation and proceeded to break the consecrated wafer into a corresponding number of pieces. The perfect unblemished circle of the host was broken. All that remained of its original integrity was a heap of fragments on the plate. “My life is like that,” I realized.
The fractioning of my days is not likely to end any time soon. But perhaps—by a miracle of grace, by the grace of God—I can come to see myself not as meaninglessly disintegrated but as broken and given like bread, poured out like wine. Maybe God will so enlighten the eyes of my heart that I will come to see that all my time—no matter how broken and scattered—is in God’s hand. There may even be such a miracle that I can come to see God present in small moments as surely as I find grace offered in a crumb at the Lord’s table.
From The Praying Life: Seeking God in All Things by Deborah Smith Douglas. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com