Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
Ah, the memories.
Who doesn’t like to talk about Snowmageddon, the 2010 series of winter storms during which Washington ground to a halt, or the June 2012 derecho that left millions without power and was responsible for twenty-two deaths?
Or maybe you’ve got a story about where you were when the towers fell or when John or Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King was assassinated or when the Berlin Wall fell.
And who could forget your wedding day, birth of your first child, or the death of your parents?
These are some of the memories by which we mark our lives, the big, eventful type of stuff.
Perhaps we’re less likely to remember the smaller events that threaten to eat away at our spiritual life: Just what it was that that new pastor said that was so awful we chose to skip Mass or go elsewhere rather than address it with him. Just what it was that annoyed us so much about that person who ran the ministry at the homeless shelter that we stopped volunteering. Just what pressing to-do on our list got us out of the habit of doing the daily readings or other spiritual study. Do you remember? Probably not. But your behavior changed as a result, and not for the better.
May we all be more vigilant when those events threaten what we have worked for: a nurturing relationship with the Lord and his people.
