When Baxter arises from a nap, the first thing he does is stretch. His is not a half-hearted exercise. When he stretches, he seems to engage every joint, muscle and ligament in his body. He stands, curls his back in a Halloween pose, then places his front paws far in front of him and pulls his body. Finally, he extends his back legs to pull his body from behind. Sometimes, as a last flourish, he will stand upright and separately shake each of his back legs before he scurries off looking for stray kibble. After witnessing an episode of this cat yoga, I do admire Baxter’s flexibility and the way his body seems to fall back into place after an extended period of restful slumber. Stretching gets him ready to take on the wakeful world again.
We need to stretch as well. We need it to get tone back in our muscles and help to avoid injury. But we need to stretch our spirits also. Too often our spiritual lives become compacted and limp. We follow comfortable routines we have done for years that lull us to sleep. We say prayers, but often miss the meaning of what we are saying. We go to Mass on Sundays, but come out of church not remembering what we said and did there. We drop a donation in the collection for some need, but don’t feel the pinch of sacrificial giving. We have heard each other speak, but we don’t listen to each other’s hearts behind the words. We go through life half-asleep and enjoying the comforts we use to keep us that way. We can become spiritually soft and weak, and not realize how we got this way.
We need to stretch. Sometimes life stretches us and invites us to cooperate in the exercise. We face challenges in raising children, in a job, in marital relationships and friendships. We can ignore them and pretend that everything is just as it always was, or we can try to reach out in new ways, to try new approaches, to go in directions we have never explored before. God unfolds Himself in ongoing ways if we go beyond our comfort zone. At other times, we ourselves can stretch our limits. Like an athlete, we can challenge ourselves to give a little more, do a little more, think a little deeper, pray in a new form that reaches into the silence of God’s mystery. These efforts help to condition us to expand and strengthen our spirits. We become more flexible to discover God’s presence in ways and circumstances we missed before. We can adapt to how God wants to be with us, rather than in how we want God to be for us. Grace begins to condition our spiritual lives, rather than our setting the conditions for God in our lives.
Baxter is quite smart to stretch before he gets moving again after a rest. It aligns his body and avoids injuries. Some stretching of our spirits would do all of us some good as well, aligning us more with God’s ways rather than our own, and making our hearts nimble to avoid silly hurts and take on genuine forgiveness.
-Monsignor Statnick
