My Christmas Present for Baby Jesus

How can the inspiration of the Holy Spirit be described?  I have heard no heavenly voices, but there have been times when an idea from the Lord seems to arrive, to have been placed in my heart by God.

I like Evelyn Waugh's analogy of God as a fisherman who, once he gets a hook in the fish, will give the fish as much slack line as it wants.  The fish will run and run, and when it has worn down its strength in trying to escape, it is that much easier for the fisherman to pull it out of the water with a quick tug on the line.  ("the twitch upon the thread").

This is not to say that I've been trying to run away from God, but believers will know what I mean when I say that the heart experiences from time to time the tug of a rope that yanks your attention straight out of the flow of time, and for a brief moment you are like a fish who has been pulled into the air, and sees the wider world beyond the pond.  And it is the great cosmic joke and tragedy of human existence that this arrives as a surprise even the fifth and tenth and twentieth time it happens.  Our minds are that dim.

Twice this fall, I have been called.

My present for Baby Jesus this Christmas is a resolution to reform my life in a specific, yet immaterial way.  I will probably fail at first, because what I'm going to try to do ultimately is to make a clean break with the zeitgeist (the "spirit of the times").

The seed of the idea, at the moment of inspiration, was to swear off sarcasm and "negative humor".  But I quickly saw that reining in my toungue is only a first step -- because knowing my own weakness, I will not be successful for very long if I don't also obey the same resolution in my thoughts, and again knowing my own weakness, I will not keep control of my interior life for very long if I don't alter my intellectual diet.  So I'm going to be cutting a lot of sarcastic humor and time-wasting diversion out of my rss reader as well.

So before I have even started, the idea of it has snowballed into something very ambitious and frightening.  It has grown into nothing less than to unite my whole interior life with the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Seeing it on such a grand scale, I am sure that I will fail.  But, even so: The Ring must be destroyed.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.