My spouse and I have been observing the new Apple Tv show “Shrinking.” It’s pleasant television featuring an extraordinary forged: Jason Segel, Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford. Segel’s character, Jimmy, is a therapist battling to offer with the dying of his spouse, his strained marriage with his daughter and his individual frustrations with those who look for him out in require of treatment.
We know how to resolve their challenges, he claims. Why do not we just tell them the responses?
And so, in opposition to the suggestions of all people all around him, he does. He tells his shoppers exactly what he thinks they should do to really feel improved.
The show’s theme tune, “Terrifying Fishes,” by Ben Gibbard – the lead vocalist of Death Cab for Cutie – and Tom Howe, is equally pleasant – and illuminative. The chorus goes like this:
Assist me carry this excess weight
That’s dragging me down
Pull me out of the consume
Ahead of I start out to drown
Allow the wreckage all sink
To wherever the fishes are horrifying
I want to hear myself believe again.
As we commence our journey as a result of these 40 times and commit ourselves to finding the elegance concealed in the desert of Lent, I feel this track – the very first of several you are going to be invited to reflect upon this Lent – presents us path.
It is rather plainly a phone for assist, proper? But it’s also a recognition that the aid we need to have isn’t a brief resolve, an apparent respond to, a band-help. No, it’s a process, and it is just one we want companions to accompany us through. Regardless of what the stuff is which is weighing us down – you, me, your neighbor, your kid, that dude at get the job done – we have to have aid shaking it off. We need assistance naming it and then stepping beyond it, letting that pointless pounds sink to the depths of the proverbial ocean.
But that’s continue to not the finish. Because then, once we have gotten a tiny respiratory home, then we change back again to that voice within, to pay attention additional intentionally, far more deeply.
Later on in the song, we listen to these lyrics:
I have been hoping my best to concede
To cease to just take, just receive
‘Cause there’s additional than your adore
That I need to have.
I marvel if we never listen to echoes of St. Ignatius’ Suscipe prayer: a drive to give all to God and be articles to receive exclusively that which God presents us. And what does God give? Enjoy and grace.
This period of Lent is a time to obtain the like and grace that God wishes to give. Our Lenten spiritual practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving support us vacant ourselves and our daily life of all that stuff that is dragging us down, which is preserving us from encountering God, so that we can hear ourselves assume all over again, so that we can listen to that tranquil, nonetheless voice of God talking.
And when we listen to that voice more and extra plainly, at situations a whisper, at other instances a good booming shout, I marvel if we do not uncover ourselves challenged to glance at our very own lives and those of other folks with practically nothing but really like and grace. Lent is a time to obstacle ourselves, yes, but only in so much as that challenge helps us greater embrace the beauty God has already placed in just our very selves and each individual inch of generation.
Then, so influenced by that elegance, it’s all we can do but cherish it and share it with many others.
Want to hear to “Frightening Fishes” for oneself? Click listed here!
https://www.youtube.com/view?v=gIR3ct774B8
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This is the initial of our Lenten reflections. If you have not but signed up for our “Beauty in the Desert” campaign, you can nonetheless do so listed here!
Eric A. Clayton is the award-winning creator of Cannonball Times: Telling Your Tale, Deepening Your Faith (Loyola Press) and the deputy director of communications at the Jesuit Convention of Canada and the United States. His essays on spirituality, parenting and pop tradition have appeared in The us Journal, Nationwide Catholic Reporter, U.S. Catholic, Busted Halo and much more, and he is a common contributor to Give Us This Day, IgnatianSpirituality.com and Dork Side of the Force, in which he blogs about Star Wars. His fiction has been published by Black Hare Push, the Environment of Fantasy Magazine and a lot more. He life in Baltimore, MD with his spouse, two youthful daughters and their cat, Sebastian.
