Once of the occupational hazards of being monks who gather seven times a day in this chapel to worship and pray, is that our hearts and minds can sometimes (or even frequently) be beset by such a barrage of distractions that seem to qualify us for Jesus’ rebuke to the Pharisees, namely, that we honor him with our lips, while our hearts are far from him. Similarly, our sometimes half-hearted efforts at ongoing conversion seem to ignore Saint James’ exhortation that we be doers of the word, and not hearers only. In like vein, how consistently do the vows we pronounced so fervently with our lips (on the day of our profession) find expression in our daily thoughts, words, and actions?
In striving towards having our hearts in harmony with our words, and in struggling to be doers of the word, and thus faithful to our vows, we must never forget that all these noble efforts will be of little avail unless they are preceded, accompanied, and perfected, by the transformation of our hearts. For, as Jesus explained, sinful attitudes, thoughts, words, actions and behaviors—while certainly influenced by outside factors—are primarily expressions of those deep roots of sin that reside in the depths of our hearts and that are the tragic consequences of our estrangement from God and our alienation from the One who created us good and without blemish.
Thus, in our ongoing efforts to offer God more than lip-service, and to become doers of God’s Word in fidelity to our baptismal and vowed commitment, we cannot neglect this deeper and more painful inner work by which we uncover, identify, and then expose, our sinful condition to the cauterizing but healing fire of God’s purifying love. In other words, merely straining to concentrate when praying the psalms and forcing ourselves to be doers of the Word—however laudable—cannot substitute for this unavoidable inner work that lies at the heart of ongoing conversion, sanctification, and ultimate divinization.
Distractedness at prayer, along with behaviors incongruent with our allegiance to Christ, as well as unchallenged infidelities to our vows, thus all serve as spiritual indicators pointing to work still to be done and purification still to be undergone. As such, these obstacles to undistracted prayer and a life of virtue and wholeness, are to be patiently borne and permitted to serve their function of disclosing our incompleteness and the long road still to be traveled. Otherwise, by resisting looking within our hearts and, instead, trying by sheer force of will and dogged determination, to simply overcome our distractions, behavioral incongruities, and other expressions of our still sinful state, will all only delay our progress and thwart the Spirit’s work of recreation.
And so, while not being complacent or indifferent to our distractions and all the other ways in which we tend towards paying only lip-service to God, let us also not be overly discouraged and so give up the struggle to persevere in the inner work still to be done. Or, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews expresses it, do not throw away your confidence; it will have great recompense. You need endurance to do the will of God and rec