Ghosts

There are times when I feel almost overwhelmed by ghosts—no, not phantasms, or spirits, or things that go “bump” in the night, but the kind of ghosts that a person with a less than stellar past collects in life. I wish that I could say that the past is behind me. It should be. God has endowed me with a gift beyond price, but I spurn it, I ignore it, I intentionally forget it...because I want my own way. I am still stubborn and prideful, willful to the point of absolute absurdity. And when I start rolling in it deep, that's when the ghosts come trotting out on parade.

Regrets. Failures. Disasters. Pain and heartache and sorrows, both the recent and those long since gone by, come traveling through this dark and diseased psyche of mine. I have spent whole hours lost in memories of things that were; things that I wish I could forget, or finally close off. The demon of despair is one I have a particularly hard time fending off; acedia is the condition that, sadly, comes upon me all too often.

And so it is with a heavy heart that in these early hours of the morning I am contemplating the words of the holy prophet and king David:

Sacrifice unto God a sacrifice of praise, and pay unto the Most High thy vows. And call upon Me in the day of thine affliction, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me. But unto the sinner God hath said: Why declarest thou My statutes and takest up My covenant in thy mouth? Thou hast hated instruction, and hast cast out My words behind thee. If thou sawest a thief, thou didst run with him; and with the adulterer thou hast set thy portion. Thy mouth hath abounded with evil, and thy tongue hath woven deceits. Thou didst sit down and speak against thy brother, and against thine own mother's son didst thou lay a stumbling-block; these things thou didst, and I kept silence. Thou didst think an iniquity, that I should be like unto thee; I will reprove thee, and bring thy sins before thy face. Wherefore, understand these things, ye that forget God, lest He snatch you away and there be none to deliver you. A sacrifice of praise shall glorify Me, and there is the way wherein I shall show unto him My salvation. (from Psalm XLIX)

And really...I have nothing to say for myself after that.

Dominus vobiscum+