When the flames of faith first blaze within a person’s heart, they burn like a forest fire. Everything is aglow … nothing is too small to be caught up in the fire that suddenly burns from within.
My flames were roaring at one point in my life.
True, I was born Catholic – a “cradle Catholic” as they say – but like many people of all faiths, there came a point in my life when I stopped chasing after things I thought would make me happy and instead I chased after the Lord.
They call this “renewal.”
I went through this phase nearly 20 years ago. And I fell hard.
Daily meditations on the Rosary.
Faithful recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours.
Daily Mass – or if not, at lease keeping up with the daily readings.
Spiritual retreats.
I was like a growing child who needed a well-balanced diet in order to continue to grow.
Then, several years into this renewal, I started to drift away from that steady diet of healthy options and began trending toward “fast food” options.
Rosaries became less frequent. The daily Liturgy suffered valleys and peaks (mostly valleys) and long, thoughtful meditations became brief moments of thought in between checking my e-mails and looking at social media.
It’s a very noisy world out there and it can be a struggle to stay focused on that well-balanced diet of spiritual food.
Like many, this drift away from those early flames would be corrected over time … only to drift again and again.
It’s a lifelong struggle. But we continue to try.
In our first reading today from the Book of Revelations – that prophetic text filled with rich, haunting imagery that has been so misunderstood and mischaracterized over the years – there contains a bit of simple, basic prophecy from our Lord.
In the reading, Jesus scolds us for becoming complacent in our faith. Even though we have done well and we continue to say the right things, Jesus knows how easily our flames can be doused.
“… you have lost the love you had at first.
Realize how far you have fallen.
Repent, and do the works you did at first.
Otherwise, I will come to you
and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”
Such powerful words.
We have “lost the love” we had at first. Our flames have died out and our hearts are starting to grow cold.
We must “realize how far (we) have fallen” … and that’s not easy because the world is filled with wonderful “creature comforts” that make us feel warm and snuggly.
But warm and snuggly is not always a good thing. It can lead us down a wrong path. Even a frog is warm and snuggly as he sits in that pot of water, waiting for the boil that will eventually kill him.
Sometimes, we have to choose to walk away from the warm snugglies and accept the cold reality that keeping our focus on our faith is simply not easy.
The monks who rise each day before dawn to chant the Morning Hours are well aware of the difficulty of getting out of a warm bed for the dark, cold confines of a church that only comes to life when the morning candles are lit and the Psalms are sung.
Had they stayed in bed … the church would have remained cold all day.
Are we as Christians staying in bed too long?
Isn’t it time we tossed aside the world’s false blankets, jumped out of bed and started walking back to those flames that once filled us with so much warmth that we could stand naked before God?
Therein lies the rub.
We will be naked when we meet our maker, just as we were when he created us in the womb.
It will be a cold day, that day, if our flames are not burning from within.
A cold day indeed.
