Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
It’s always a bit startling when you realize that your Padre is going to take as the topic of his homily an issue that’s already preying on your mind. Spooky, on the one hand, because you start to wonder just what kind of thought-reading capacity actually does come with his job. Comforting, on the other, when you realize he really wouldn’t be bringing it up if it wasn’t a pretty common issue.
Father was talking today about the journey toward holiness and chose to use the metaphor of driving on snow. To do so successfully, he said, first you have to put away the cellphone and stop yelling at the kids in the back seat. Then you have to remember to be always applying gentle pressure to the gas pedal, keeping up momentum. In this way, the force of acceleration causes the tire to control its interaction with the road. If you just coast, taking away that force, then the road will start dictating the manner in which it interacts with the tire and, sooner or later, you’ll find yourself going where you don’t want to go. And finally, of course, you have to avoid all violent, sudden motions of either gas, brake, or steering wheel. Calm and cool but always gently pushing does it.
Ol’ Robbo almost inevitably falls into most of these snow-driving traps in his Lenten observations. Usually feeling rayther shabby and dissolute rolling into the season, I make big plans for all the things I’m going to give up cold-turkey as well as the strict regimen of prayer and reading to which I’m going to subject myself. It is, in fact, the equivalent of jamming on both gas and break pedal at the same time and cranking the wheel hard over. And almost invariably after my first week or so, I’m in the ditch. It usually takes me another week to, as it were, pull myself out and, at about the third Sunday, to set out anew.
Whelp, here we are again. I’m just hoping that I will keep Father’s metaphor tucked away somewhere in my braims and maybe finally learn something about driving this time and going forward.
UPDATE: Yes, the Carrie Underwood reference in the title. I was a bit dubious about its tastefulness but it was too good to resist, given the subject matter.
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