“Off you go. Fly!” (Saint Josemaría, “The Forge, page 39).
The other day I took my children to the Zoo. One of the highlights of a trip to the Zoo – for my children and me – is the free-flight bird show. We simply love watching the birds fly and the interactions of the different types of birds.
The last time we went to watch that show, we saw some beautiful eagles take flight. The eagles were obviously trained to return to their keepers at the end of the flight, but we were able to see them soaring high into the skies as they circled overhead and we heard about how the eagles fly and hunt.
And I have been thinking about those eagles, because they fly so much higher than other birds and in fact uses this height to hunt other birds as its prey. Saint Josemaría in his work, “The Forge” tells, at page 39, the story of an eagle… “…Our little bird is snatched up by an eagle, who mistakes the bird for one of its own brood. In its powerful talons the bird is borne higher and higher, above the mountains of the earth and the snow capped peaks, above the white, blue and rose pink clouds, and higher and higher until it can look right into the sun. And then the eagle lets go of the little bird and says: Off you go. Fly! Lord, may I never flutter again close to the ground. May I always be enlightened by the rays of the divine sun Christ in the Eucharist. May my flight never be interrupted until I find repose in your Heart.”
And I have been thinking about that prayer of the Saint to not be let go of to fly alone. I have been thinking about how that prayer shows his faith.
For it is one thing to think about all the things that I can do through my own power and my own strength, and quite another to think about all the ways that I can rely on God to help me instead…
For it seems to me – today – that everything that I have ever tried to do on my own merit has been a complete and utter dismal failure and that everything that I have relied on the Lord my God to achieve for me has been good and successful. And this does not mean that if I simply pray for a thing that it will turn out perfectly as though I were a child buying a snack from a vending machine. Rather, this means that I know that when I rely on God nothing can actually go wrong. Because God has HIS plan that is for MY good. And if I could just rely on His plan then everything will be alright and all things will be achieved. It is when I start looking to myself and my own ideas that everything seems to feel so wrong.
And so I was thinking today that I would just like to trust in the Lord my God because if I could just do that then I could really have the wisdom to chose the right thing in my life and then and only then could I really fly…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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