Lost in Faith

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do i really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone." Thomas Merton (whom I consider to be a great spiritual giant)

Seven words from last week's lectionary readings

Ask

Wisdom

Awe

Pursue

Understand

Blood

Tongue

"If you aspire to be a person of consolation, if you want to share the priestly gift of sympathy, if you desire to go beyond giving commonplace comfort to a heart that is tempted, and if you long to go through the daily exchanges of life with the kind of tact that never inflicts pain, then you must be prepared to pay the price for a costly education -- for like Christ, you must suffer." Streams In The Desert.

A father speaking to his daughter in Cage of Stars "I know you think that I am severe, but I love you, not only as a child of God, but as a child of my family. I'm simply not demonstrative. And I can't presume to improve on the lesson given you by our Heavenly Father. It was precisely correct. In the end we teach ourselves. A sunflower may look like a withered and broken stick in the winter, but in the spring it will rise up new, and turn its face to the sunlight and grow tall."

from Roman Catholic theologian Josef Ratzinger speaking about "extreme beauty", "see in the torture, crucifixion, and death of Jesus the love of God displayed at its most potent: in His Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love for humankind that goes to the very end." To put it another way, God's sacrificial, saving love in Christ has been stretched out even to redeem that which is ugly and abused. There can be no room for prettiness or sentimental loveliness in the cross of Christ. Another ancient theologian said, "God's beauty embraces the most abysmal ugliness of sin and hell by virtue of the condescension of divine love, which has brought even sin and hell into that divine art for which there is no human analogue." Balthasar

Arturo Araujo ia a Columbian Jesuit. On a single day, while he was away at school, ten members of his family, caught between extorting guerrillas and pro-government vigilantes, wee massacred in their village. Numb with pain and reduced to silence, he reflects on the incident: "When you are living in situations with certainties of violence, the only support you will find is a silent God."

I remember that Elijah's encounter with God was "in the sound of sheer silence." And the Psalmist taught us "to be still and know that God is God."

I like the following from "Our Daily Bread":  "God pursues us in our restlessness, receives us in our sinfulness, holds us in our brokeness."