A disordered life.

 I'm trying to post every day, but I'm not good enough or disciplined enough to do it. I can see tomorrow, Ash Wednesday shaping up to be a busy day, with hours of travel time added in. May or not see a post tomorrow. On the bright side, I was able to check off everything from my to-do list by lunch time. Not a lot of things to finish, but one important job was making a new list for the ushers at our Chapel. We're called ushers, but all we do is pass the baskets every week for the collections. There are only five of us but we're all old school, so an actual paper list works best for us. This list goes out until the last Sunday in June, so I won't have to worry about this for a while. 

Lent is now right on top of us, and tomorrow we'll make the trip to Nashua for the Fraternity Mass at 12:10. We've been there before, it's a very nice church, but not good in the way of parking. I have a handicap placard, but when there's a lot of people, even that might not be of any help. Not a problem, if I can park close, good, if not these small sufferings are good for me. I try to accept them well, but I'm not good at it. And we much teach ourselves to suffer well, even joyfully, but let me be the first to tell you, to suffer joyfully, I really don't understand how that is done. I consider myself a happy man, sort of, normally, well, you know what I mean. But joyful, that's something different, that is a more spiritual thing, and it's something I ponder when that subject comes up. A disordered life prevents us from seeing clearly, and that's probably my problem. Now that I'm older and somewhat handicapped, the physical attractions of this world are less, but sometimes the mental and spiritual distractions are much more. Satan never gives up his claws in you; it's a war that will last until our last dying breath. And suffering is all a part of it, perhaps for some of us, the biggest part of a life well (trying to) lived. 

• Our passions, our innate tendency to enjoy, often cry out in us and try by a thousand pretexts to hinder us from following Jesus crucified. Let us remain firm in our faith. - Fr. Gabriel