Finding the Higher Purpose

The week has been filled with ups and downs.  But if there is one thing I've come to realize it is this.  Distress allows a person to sharpen something in their thoughts and unearth a solution or magnify a problem.  Anxiety allows a person to push forward or to back down.  My reaction to what distresses me is something borne from my experience, my values, my character and my skills.  One thing I have learned from my Mom this morning is that when you are in a situation that doesn't make sense, you need to find it in you to elevate your attention to a higher purpose and focus on what makes sense there.  

Terminal death is a death that ends life, ends possibilities.  It brings dreams, health, honeymoons and happiness to final closure.  Paschal death is real death.  Something precious dies.  However in this kind of death there is an opening to a new life and a new spirit.  In paschal death there is always a birth as well, just as in childbirth a woman also loses her child in giving it birth.  The paschal mystery, the passage through death to new life, though normally associated with Christ's death and resurrection, is in its widest sense a natural mystery.  All reality grows and deepens through it.

Christ's life, however, offers its deepest modeling, and his death and resurrection are a paschal drama in which we can participate.  As an event in Christ's life, the paschal mystery has four distinct movements.  Together these form one dynamic movement from death to life.   

Passion and death: the loss of life.  Resurrection: the reception of new life.  Ascension: the refusal to cling, as ascending beyond the old life.  Pentecost: the reception of new spirit for the new life. 

When we stop clinging, when we give ourselves over to God in trust, new life will be conceived and new spirit will be released.  

I think about these words from Ronald Rolheiser again because I have noticed that my life as of late has been experiencing a series of deaths.  I am feeling a little bit impatient for a resurrection but at the same time struggling to ascend into a new life of possibilities.  While I go through a series of disappointments in the work place I dig myself a pit of discouragement that weighs heavily on my back and does not enable me to look up and hope for what can come.  I do not wish to be that way anymore.  I want to hope and I want to know the unceasing joy and peace that comes from that hope.