Losing it...

Real holiness doesn't feel like holiness; it just feels like you're dying. It feels like you're losing it. And yet, you're losing it from the center, from a place where all things are One, where you can joyously, graciously let go of it. You know God's doing it when you can smile, when you can trust the letting go.

Many of us were taught the no without the yes, the joy. We were trained just to put up with it, to take it on the chin. Saying no to the self does not necessarily please God. When God, by love and freedom, can create a joyous yes inside of you - so much so that you can absorb the no's - then it's God’s work

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 334.

I don't know much about real holiness, but I certainly know about the feelings Rohr describes here. I've often described the feeling as being a little like sitting at the top of a water flume at a swimming pool - once you let go of the rail, you've no effective control left, and the only thing to do is to say yes to gravity and low friction, and enjoy the ride. We have to trust God's hand beneath us, even when humanly there is every reason not to trust - and that's hard. That's when it does feeling like losing it, like dying. But one day it will be dying. What will we do then?

Father, give me grace always to trust you, through impossible times, through that last river, to the far and golden shore... through Jesus Christ, our only Saviour. Amen!