Vince’s Daily Journal – Day 10
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The Magnificat is a Catholic daily devotional that draws from the Mass and the breviary to provide several pages of prayer and readings for each day. At the end of the Mass section for the day, it includes a ‘Meditation of the Day’. Unlike most devotionals, however, it uses writings from saints and Church teachers past rather than a contemporary author. Remarkably, it actually makes it feel more currently relevant – these are issues so core to humanity that they exist across generations. Today’s meditation was from Fr. Max Joseph Metzger, a German priest and founder of the Mission Society of the White Cross who was imprisoned and put to death by the Nazis for his outspoken resistance. The quote is from a letter written to his sister from prison. (Yes, I do see the obvious throughline that is following me day to day right now, and I’m gonna roll with it) He talks about the joy he finds in his imprisonment, that it offers him what he has “longed for, an interval of quiet concentration, removed from all demands of ‘business'” He tells her that this is something he’s wished to do for a long time, following in the footsteps of the Desert Fathers, St. Paul, even Jesus himself, to tear himself from the world and retreat into the ‘desert’, and rejoices “in the real poverty and obedience in which I live here, so that for one I can at least go about actually doing what I preach to others… Here I can do it” This is a way of seeing suffering that I aspire to, but have not achieved to the degree I would like yet. Even more, it’s a way of seeing God’s presence in the world that is truly awesome – the God who’s freedom transcends even the most strict forms of bondage, bondage in which you are reduced to a number – no longer tattooed on us like Fr. Metzger and so many others suffered, but still there, indelibly, on our hearts. So my challenge now is to be aware of this mindset, and consciously attempt to move myself towards this by thanking God for my sufferings until it develops into more than words, by actively looking for God’s activity in my daily life (the nightly Examen works great for this), most of all by focusing on what I can do for God and my neighbor, rather than worrying about what I want, or my discomforts. I think this is something we all should take up in our lives, but I’m making it my key focus, since it seems clear that’s where I’m being led right now. So, I’ll close with Fr. Metzger’s closing, acknowledging that, what for him was lived reality, is mostly aspirational for me right now, striving to reach that same point one day.
“Here I feel that material bondage does not enslave. He is free whose spirit is great enough to master all events. And that is possible only in God. Hence the ‘freedom of the sons of God’ (Rom 8:21). Now I commend everything to the Lord God, in whose hands we are all safeguarded. May he bless you and all of us.”
