Being Ready

Tonight after Mass I was reading a little book called Lumina/New Lumina, which has sayings of the twentieth century mystic Adrienne von Speyr.  In one small passage she writes, "Love has no beginning, since before it became concrete, it was already present in the attitude of readiness." 

I LOVE this. 

I was praying about my desire for a good man in my life, and this passage made me pause and think about how beautiful the attitude of readiness is, and how we need it every moment of every day.  

I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "It'll happen (love) when you least expect it."  "He must not be ready to meet you yet."  "You must not be just ready for him yet."  But I'm not sure the use of readiness is used as it should be in these consolations.  Phrases like the ones above tend make me feel that I'm not yet at a demarcated point that I need to be at in order to have the love of a husband.  But I'm not sure if readiness can be measured.  We are constantly cultivating readiness.  It's a space, a place, an attitude, a state of life, in which we make room for another.  I like this idea of meditating on being ready as a dynamic movement, a continual process, more than the arrival at some time or state of perfection.  

Von Speyr's words can (and should) be read about the space and attitude that we must continually create and prepare for Christ.  It's the attitude that the world needed to have before Love (God) became "concrete," or incarnate.  But even when the world was "ready," nothing about the people who encountered Christ was perfect.  How they misunderstood him, misread the signs, mistook his message.  The circumstances were not always ideal, the setting not close to perfect.  Neither are we ever perfectly ready for Christ when He asks us to do things, to carry people, to bear situations.  But our whole lives entail the act of cultivating this preparedness for Him in our hearts.  

I pray for all single men and women to discern on a daily basis how to make room for the "other," especially for their spouse and for Christ.