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And thank you right back, my dear BB, in No Trump, Doubled, vulnerable.

So there.

I may have said before, my prayer after the Agnus Dei, around the time of the ‘fraction’ of the bread, is this:

Lord, break my heart.
For I trust against my fears that
If You break it, You will mend it
And fill it with yourself.

And as I receive the Lord, I pray what Thomas Aquinas prayed when Jesus asked Him what he wanted: Nil nisi te — Nothing but You[, Lord].

At some point this means no “consolations”, no exuberance, no FEELING of ‘presence,’ but only living the choice the Spirit has made in us.

We have chosen to die in Christ so that we may live in Him.

He lovingly respects that choice. We sin enough that no illusory props of “self-esteem” remain - only our longing.

And it is not a passionate yearning, but, wounded as we are, it is anemic, languid. The only available solace is a cold clinical observation that we choose Him, we hope in Him, we love Him, because “Where else would we go?” there is nothing but Him to choose. It is either to choose Him or to choose not to choose.

His body must have grown cold that Friday Night, while strife unimaginable took place in realms we cannot understand, with weapons we can never grasp.

We cannot even understand the cold, but we can feel it. And when there is nothing else, there is yet the knowledge, clutched at with weakening will, that HE is the VICTOR!

If I may not fight in His army, please, Father, let me die in it. To die in that strife is better than to live anywhere else.

“that God may be all, and in all.”

Good morning, beloved in the Lord!

Humility — authoritatively derived from humus, earth, soil.

Part of the wonder if living in the Piedmont of the once mighty Appalachian massif is the variable quality of the soil. When I moved here 28 years ago, my first job was, no kidding, laboring in a Vineyard. Specifically we planted about 7 acres of vines. We used transplanting spades - all metal. You jam it in the earth, put the vine in the hole, then jam the spade a little behind the hole and rock it forward the compress the soil around the vine. Then step off a few feet and do it again. And again. And again.

In some spots, the soil was so clayey that it was hard to get the spade in. 10 feet away, in what I supposed was another part of the ancient river bed, it was so loose you could bury the bar just by rocking it back and forth.

On my place, which has been settled since the late 17th century, the soil is so compacted that parts of my alleged lawn will not permit a shrub to grow, only grass and moss.

But in most places if you dig a good hole and put the shrub in, it will grow, but VERY slowly at first. Near the porch I planted a Japanese boxwood (Buxus microphylla japonica) about 6” tall. It was a “volunteer” at my parents’ place.

For 3 years it just sat there. It was clearly alive but it seemed not to grow at all. Then, finally, it took off. Now it’s a yard high and vigorous.

I conclude that all the time when it looked like nothing was happening, it was devoting all its energy into sending roots downwards and outwards.

You can make the requisite analogy. May God grow in the soil of our hearts, and one day blossom and set fruit and finally drop it in a world so sorely in need of Him.