The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 6 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

More Dorothy Day:

Is suffering and death, and the strength to bear them, all there is in this struggle? This search for God would be a pretty grim affair if this were all, and transcendence too high a goal for simple folk. 

Let us remember other elements too. 

“What is it that I love when I love my God,” St. Augustine cried out in his Confessions. It is a certain light that I love and melody and fragrance and embrace that I love when I love my God–a light, melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the God-within, where for my soul, that shines which space does not contain; that sounds which time does not sweep away; that is fragrant which the breeze does not dispel, and that tastes sweet which, fed upon, is not diminished, and that clings close which no satiety disparts–this is what I love when I love my God." 

And Catherine of Siena assures us that “all the way to Heaven is Heaven, because He said, I am the Way.”

This is all to say, by restructuring your perspective on your suffering (and this goes for all of us), I think you'll soon discover that these burdens are blessings. In one of Day's most moving passages, she refers to our slow and painful procession toward death (what St. Paul called "the body of death") as "a life in the womb."

A life in the womb! What a fine perspective!

I have such a fondness for this particular outlook on our journey that it reminds me, and I frequently need to be reminded, that every moment of every hour of every day we are still growing, still learning, still failing, still succeeding in these failures, sprinting decades backward only to crawl one scoot forward. And all our lives, this is how it will be. Do babies give up when they toddle over, subjecting themselves from that first fall forward to a life of self-willed paralysis? Of course not.

That's silly to ask, even rhetorically. But what are we now if not babies in the womb caught in the amber of preparation for that glorious day when we are "released from bondage," the moment we "at last burst out into glorious day?" And how many are there among us who impose that spiritual paralysis upon ourselves after falling but once from our elevated state of grace in the garden?