Ascent and Prostrate

While hiking through the mountains as orientation for TMC last week, I thought of how all people seem to have a deep desire to ascend. We desire to strive,to go beyond limits, to soar and be unbonded. Perhaps that's why we climb mountains. It's like the mentality of the Tower of Babel wasn't just those people at that time. It is all of us always. And we are constantly building little Towers of Babel in our lives to be like ladders to carry us up. I think God has implanted this desire in us, as something curiously human, something to take us up to heaven where all that is human will be fulfilled in His magnificent glory. This desire then is a good and pure passion, and it drives us to seek purification and ascention from all that is muddied with sin and evilness. If sin is the lack of good, then sinning is lacking goodness. And if we are made to BE good, then sinning is ceasing, to some degree, to BE. Every time we sin we die a little.

Then during Mass that evening, kneeling on rock, it occured to me that it is when we lower ourselves that we become most human. It is when we cast ourselves down that we are entirely human, for it is then that everything in us in univocally in accord with what we are: lowly, helpless creatures before our awesome God. I think of when the priest prostrates himself at the Tres Ores on Good Friday- that is the true image of humanity. And every Tridentine Mass begins with the priest kneeling and begging God for forgiveness and to accept his prayers. And when we confess out sins, and when we recieve Christ in the Eucharist, we kneel.

It is when we cast ourselves down, accepting the patheticness of our fallen human state that God can elevate us. Only Christ could ascend, for He is God. Even the sinless Virgin Mary was carried into heaven- assumed. We cannot take ourselves up, but we can humble ourselves to accept God's help. So when we truly and sincerely cast ourselves down before God, kneel with all our hearts, and admit of the burden of our sins and our flaws- then God can lift our flaws and carry us up to Himself.

The next day I was really tired, and it was an even bigger mountain we were climbing, and then we had to climb all the way back down again, so my prayer was, "Lord what strength I have is in You. Carry me up, then help me back down again."