The Perfect Storm

I am writing this on a Saturday morning. Saturdays are my writing days, when my husband takes over the kids and the house and I disappear into the office with an enormous cup of coffee and noise-canceling headphones. Saturdays are sacred — if work can be called sacred.

But Saturday morning is also the only time I’m able to consistently get to confession. Every other time the sacrament is offered in my area during the week, I seem to have unavoidable commitments — but on Saturday morning, all I have is work, and how can I let work come before a sacrament, as much as I might secretly want to?

I’ve spent a good deal of time being bitter about this, because it’s just not convenient, having to carve out time from work to run to the other side of town, especially when I get there and there’s a line. I sit there in the sanctuary, waiting my turn, checking the clock, stewing, fretting. Obsessing over forgetting one of my sins. Thinking of how much work I have when I get home.

Saturday mornings: a perfect storm, I sometimes call it in my head.

I forge ahead, though. I’ve never gotten up and dashed back to my desk. I make it into the confessional and I stammer out my pathetic little list and receive absolution. Then I go before the tabernacle to perform my penance.

It’s while I am kneeling there that it happens. Always. God awakens, and he cries into the depths of my heart: “Quiet! Be still! Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”

After teaching all day by the shore of the sea, Jesus asks his disciples to remove him from the crowds. He wants to escape the noise, the clamor, the disquiet. But the clamor follows him, because the world is full of it. Storms crop up wherever we go.

Jesus sleeps through the storm, because he understands what the disciples do not: the storms of the world cannot hurt us. They are only so much noise.

“Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?” — Mark 4:41

©LPi