Wednesday
of the 4th Week in Ordinary Time
February 4, 2015 6:30am
In the course of my life, I have
become comfortable with discipline and by that I mean self-discipline.
I am thinking of this because the
word discipline is used five times in
today’s first reading.
The one sentence says:
“All discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it
brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.”
One of the things I associate
with self-discipline is habits.
Habits are important for our
personal and spiritual development.
The dictionary defines a habit as
something that a person does often in a regular and repeated way.
Just think of this past Sunday’s
Super Bowl.
The Patriots and the Seahawks
would never have gotten there if they did not have good habits of eating and
exercise and practice.
We also need good habits for our
spiritual development.
For example, we need a daily
habit of prayer – a time or time of day that we designate each day for praying
in some way.
We need a habit of examining our
conscience at least once a week and we need to set the day and time of day for
that.
Obviously, we need a habit of
coming to Mass on Sunday.
I suggest that we also need a
habit of reading something several days a week to nourish us spiritually – a
passage from the Scripture or from some spiritual author.
And I suggest a habit of some
kind of self-denial every week, maybe just watching our diet and eating
properly to be good stewards of the health and body God has given us.
Habits like these are a good
discipline or self-discipline for us.
They slowly but surely allow God
to form us and be more alive within us.
That’s my take on today’s first
reading.
