I often suffer from anxiety and depression. When I really contemplate my mental/spiritual state I find that it arises from Pride. I spend so much time in my mind, stroking my poor ego, and wishing the world, and those around me, would change. The only person who can and needs to change – is me. I have found the short meditation below extremely helpful for resetting my vision and learning, once again, the world doesn’t revolve around me. It revolves around Him.
Working to reorient my vision to revolve around Him is difficult because I am so sinful and prideful. However, when I see this life as the place of testing my love and the people He has placed in my life as part of that test, I can love more fully and freely. Nothing matters but pleasing Him by loving others to the best of my ability, and like He loves, when I have the strength and grace.
This virgin martyr rests on the instrument of her martyrdom, an appallingly cruel instrument, a wheel of knives to which she is tied and cut to pieces. Yet she stands, a magnificently womanly woman, with her gaze serenely fixed on God. She is a woman of faith, looking beyond appearances, beyond the way in which he comes to him who comes.
Now we are tied to the wheel of life, a slower process, less cruel, but more prolonged. How do we see it? How do we take it? Like Catherine(of Alexandria)? As hour by hour something is demanded of me, opportunities for letting of self for the sake of others, to be faithful to my duties, do I always let go, entrust myself to life (which is really to him), or do I allow my egotism to evade the demands, perhaps wholly, perhaps in part?
When life presses, when I am attacked by a mood of depression, boredom, frustration, self-pity, do I give in to it and remain absorbed in self? Or do I, like Catherine, fix my eyes on him and see that this is precisely what takes me to him, this is how he comes? Monotony, other people with their irritating characteristics which get on my nerves, the daily, inexorable round of duties, material and spiritual, all these form the wheel on which I go to him…. [A Christian] lives by principles, not by ever-changing feelings, and for a Christian, principles are simply the teachings of Jesus or the will of God. If we really let go and surrender, then what we find so irksome naturally speaking becomes precious to us, we can lean on it, cease to fear it. We grasp that it is really Jesus himself.
SISTER RUTH BURROWS, O.C.D.
Before dying by the sword, let us die by pinpricks. – Therese of Lisieux
James M. Hahn, Author 