Spiritual Sundays

It's July, his birth month, and I've been thinking of my dad a lot lately.

Thinking and remembering times long past, and words given in the seeming eons of a childhood far away and gone.

Recalling his ways and phrases..many of which I find surfacing from the depths of my mind in moments when he would have used them. 

Oftentimes,  I catch myself in the mirror of yesterday and see him..in me..today.

Strange and yet comforting.

The cycle of lessons learned from him and revisited over time..have me thinking.

Reminiscing about the days when I was small and he would lay foundations.

Ones on which I would stand and build my way of being in this world.

Though at the time I did not truly know or appreciate this gift..his legacy to me.

For example, the lesson in humility he inadvertantly taught me on that memorable Sunday..

when I arrived at church without my hat.

And how he reached into his pocket and took out a large and very masculine handkerchief which he knotted in the corners, and placed upon my head so I could attend Mass properly and reverently adorned.

And I remember the stinging humiliation..

My ego cringing and whinging within, while priest's hands held up bread "broken for you",

and I could only think of scorn and fearfully expected heaping from my peers.

Looking back through older eyes, I understand how valuable to my soul was that day's experience.

It was just a small indignity..an unintentional slighting of a young girl's sensibilities.

From my father's caring hand.

A life-lesson in humility.

And I'm so grateful that the Lord allowed my young pride to feel a little crushing of my childish vain-glory that day.

Grateful to have learned that the world (and my classmates) did not stop to pay that much attention to my head after all!

That the fears I had, and still have today, are largely of my own making and I am still in many ways just a small girl with her Father's covering laid over her eyes.

I confess that sometimes I wince at it's dull design or lack of glory as I might perceive it, and wonder why I always seem to get the plain and roughly knotted cloth while others wear embroidered lace and pearls.

Ah..my soul!

You still have much to learn about the hidden beauty of your God!

Presence hiding under the skin of badgers.. flesh of man.. ground wheat.

Humility always hides, don't you know!

Always takes the lower way and shuns the limelight, content to wear the weaving of a simple life.

Humility walks quietly through the midst of the crowd unrecognised,

and smiles in freedom from the fame ill-sought.

Humility..is a loving Father
who's Presence lays your pride to the axe with His softly fallen hand upon your head;

and when you are ready to give up chasing approval and applause ..you will remember this.

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linked to Charlotte and Ginger's Spiritual Sundays