In my previous post, I mentioned St. Therese of Lisieux, and how she embraced the little irritations of life as part of picking up her cross and following Christ, and applied that to all of the little irritations one might encounter at church on Sunday.

One might well ask, “But why go to a mass/service/church where you find the liturgy irritating on a regular basis?” And one would be right to do so. I’m a software engineer by profession; and like any engineer I think problems are for solving. We shouldn’t put up with bad situations; rather, we should fix them. But there’s an important distinction to be drawn here, that of the present moment vs. the future, or, as I put it in the title, of Now and Later.

Christ tells us to live in the present moment, and so we must do. And it is precisely in the present moment that we must embrace and offer up the annoyances and irritations that come our way, while at the same time attending properly to the present duty. During mass, the present duty is the mass; it is manifestly not fixing the mass. After mass, it might be appropriate to take steps—to talk to the priest, to talk to the mother of the noisy child, to resolve to try a different service. (And then again, it might not be.) It’s in the moment that we must offer up our irritations. Future irritations, I think, may reasonably be avoided.

OK, that’s easy to say….