What matters in the contemplative life is not for you or your Director to be always infallibly right, but for you to be heroically faithful to grace and to love. If God calls you to Him, then He implicitly promises you all the graces you need to reach Him. You must be blindly faithful to this promise.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, p. 244
This seems very close to the lesson God is trying to teach me this Lent. Nothing else, it seems, will do. What we have here seems to be very close to Jesus’ own journey to the Cross. Only his faithfulness, only his preparedness to go, despite the dreadful awareness of the consequences he showed in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 6.36ff; Luke 22.39ff) as far as his Father called him to, trusting only in the bare knowledge of his Father’s love, allowed the Cross to bring to us, to all creation, the healing grace that will make all things new. Merton is right: it is a heroic faithfulness to which we are called if we are to take up our own cross and follow him. God grant us the courage to trust that the grace is there, will always be there, to bring us through…
2 comments:
God be with you today, and may we all be open to the grace God offers us.
I found your blog only a few weeks ago and have been checking back daily for your new postings. They are wonderful. I love the quotes you use and the book references. And your own reflections too. Thank you for all your words. They touch my heart and the heart of those I send it to.
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