One more time…

I have just returned from my first session at the gym for more than a year. I feel sore and tired yet happy. I cannot tell you how many times in the last 5 years I have started and stopped the exercise cycle. I have tried with friends, alone, with music and without. Often I lasted days or weeks and almost always lost motivation somewhere in between and never returned. Some men/women have their fair share of starting and stopping diets as well.

As I was exercising I couldn’t help reflecting that gym, exercise and diet is analogous to our spiritual life. How many times have I started and stopped regular prayer, mass or a spiritual resolution? How many times have you said I will “start tomorrow”? How many times have you stopped and stalled? Honestly I have lost count. Dare I say, young people struggle with commitment and sticking to resolutions more than others.

But what shall we do? Shall we give up and not exercise and eat well? Should be forget about the body? What about the Spirit? Shall we forget that we are spiritual beings?  Or should we try again?

Perhaps one needs to be patient with oneself. God understands that we are confused at times and that our lives are filled with competing priorities. Perhaps one needs to write a schedule and keep a diary and make an appointment with God for Prayer. All these help and work well. Behavioural change is most essential.

But the most important thing we must ask is why? Why am I not able to commit? Is it about me or is it about God?

Perhaps its about me. Psychologists say that due to low self-esteem, sometimes and unconsciously we want to fail. We set ourselves up to fail. It’s like we don’t want to succeed in the diet or go well at the gym and be fit because deeper in the core of our being we think we are not beautiful or handsome. We don’t deserve to look good.

Spiritually this takes effect in the fact that we avoid prayer and intimacy with God because we believe we are not worthy of love. It’s like we do not and cannot accept our inner beauty, so we procrastinate prayer. We want to continue in the cycle self/inner harm. We are wounded and we run away from the true healer.

Why? Well maybe because the pain is too much and so we become afraid of the divine operation that will take place in prayer. How many people delay operations because they hate anesthetic, needles or fear pain. So we run away and hide, hoping that a miracle healing happens and when it does not we feel worse than before.

Then there is God. Who is God to me? What image do I have of God? Here is a simpler question, what image do I have of  my earthly Father? My relationship with my earthly father and my image and relationship with him affects my relationship and image of God. Not always but often.

Here I need to ask, and this is beyond the automated answers we learnt at school, is God:

Let us pray that we come wounded as we are to God. Let us pray to the Holy Spirit to come to Jesus who as Pope Francis says, “is the face of the Father’s mercy”. God is waiting, always waiting. Try again and again, one more time… God is waiting… One more time…