Readings to Return To

I’ve been spending time with the word “presence,” trying to understand its place in a world increasingly shaped by distraction. It seems we are having a harder time remaining fully where we are.

"Be happy. Keep your faith and belief. Remember the little things you have heard and seen me do, and do them."

This quote from St. David of Wales was brought up today in a teaching module. The phrase "little things" immediately caught my attention and stirred something within me.

It was the last leg of my trip, and I was ready to get home. Something happened as I was getting off the plane.

The formation weekends were four and a half hours away.

Strangely, I never fully encountered them until I got into the car.

There are days now when companionship feels more healing than certainty.

Life keeps arriving concretely:
through people,
through needs,
through tenderness,
through loss,
through small moments that do not announce themselves as sacred while they are happening.

I can see now how easily a life organized around becoming can lose contact with being present.

Not performing presence.
Not speaking about presence.
Actually inhabiting one’s own life while it is occurring.

At times that quieter self feels peaceful.

At other times it feels frighteningly undefined.

Who are we when usefulness fluctuates?

Who are we when the roles that once organized our lives no longer fit as tightly?

There are forms of loneliness that survive even inside highly responsible lives.

But I am less convinced now that a meaningful life must always feel large while it is being lived.

Some lives ripen quietly.

My wife said, “I don’t want you to do too much.”

I told myself, I’ll stay and finish.

I spent many years believing peace would arrive when nothing more was being asked of me.

Now I wonder whether peace has more to do with how we meet what arrives.

What matters to me now is not proving that an ordinary life was secretly impressive.