Putting Things in Order

I found the blog Destination: Order after it was already inactive. The blogger, TheresaAMF, entered the Dominican Monastery last September on the 29th, the feast day of the Archangels.

I keep the blog bookmarked though, because the title and sidebar description is such a good reminder to me.

The title reminds me that the search for order is a disposition, a process, an ongoing quest.

The sidebar description goes as follows:

Destination: Order refers to an ongoing quest to "order" everything in my life not only so that God has first priority, but so that love for Him transforms everything else. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you."

This reminds me that Order is not simply about having the floor picked up, or having a time and place for everything and everything in its "correct" time and place. Order is about putting things in their proper order -- that is, first priorities first.

She goes on to explain a bit more in the post linked above:

This title contains depths of meaning. In Ethics class we read St. Thomas Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. Aquinas begins:

It is the business of the wise man to order. The reason for this is that wisdom is the most powerful perfection of reason, whose characteristic is to know order. . . . to know the order of one thing to another is exclusively the work of the intellect or reason.

Man is a rational animal. Reason is his distinguishing characteristic--this sets him apart from animals, as he has a rational, immortal soul. Aquinas says the very work proper to man's reason is "to order": to observe order in reality, to order concepts within the mind, to order man's will, and to order those things man creates.

Ultimately, the most important order is the order of a thing to its final cause--the end for which it was made. Man's reason should order him to his end. Yet because reason is the faculty proper to man, the end of man's nature is to exercise this faculty to its fullest extent--knowing the highest things. The highest thing of all is God. So man's end is contemplation of God, which is, with the help of grace, the way in which the saints fully know God in heaven.

That about sums it up. Now to just live that way!