For a moment, the ramblings of this ongoing travelogue yield to the sane and deeply knowing words of Thomas Merton, excerpted from his book Thoughts in Solitude. My thanks to a parishioner from Church of the Good Shepherd for sharing them with me.
O Kind and Terrible Love
To you, Lord, I will offer a sacrifice of praise.
Let this be my only consolation, that wherever I am, You, my Lord, are loved and praised. The trees indeed love You without knowing You. The tiger lilies and corn flowers are there, proclaiming that they love You, without being aware of Your presence. The beautiful dark clouds ride slowly across the sky musing on You like children who do not know what they are dreaming of, as they play.
But in the midst of them all, I know You, and I know of Your presence. In them and in me I know of the love which they do not know, and, what is greater, I am abashed by the presence of Your love in me. O kind and terrible love, which You have given me, and which could never be in my heart if You did not love me! For in the midst of these beings which have never offended You, I am loved by You, and it would seem most of all as one who has offended You. I am seen by You under the sky, and my offenses have been forgotten by You—but I have not forgotten them….
Remembering that I have been a sinner, I will love You in spite of what I have been, knowing that my love is precious because it is Yours, rather than my own. Precious to You because it comes from Your own Son, but precious even more because it makes me Your son.
Here ends the prayer of a spiritual master and here begins again the protest of a rebel. Why should it be anyone’s consolation, and their only one at that, that God is loved and praised? What does it mean to offer a sacrifice of praise to God, or to desire that God be loved and praised? My apologies for the obvious questions, but at this moment the answers do not seem so obvious to me.
Over the years, I have become aware of the distance between my desire and my love (which is another way of saying God’s desire). Over the years, I have asked for and been granted the grace to make renunciations so that God’s desire remains in me and increases in my desire. Now I am at a point where I can see myself even more sharply than I could when I first joined the Capuchin Franciscans, when I made my first vows, and when I made my perpetual vows. God grants me more vision. And God puts to me the challenge, in this hour, to make the renunciations more real, more true, more profound. This is where I am now. I have to ask God to make the Yes of yesterday even more of a Yes today. Today I am more aware of the No I have been saying at the same time, all this time. Now I have to ask God to turn the No that was really a No into a Yes that is really a Yes. Do I really want to do it?
What I know, let me learn to love again. What I do not know, let me learn to love, too. What I want only for myself, take it away, take it away. What I do not want, what I have not wanted, that is, God’s desire, let it come to me anyway through the Holy Spirit for the sake of Jesus Christ, God’s desire in person. Amen.
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