Let my trust be in your mercy…

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources. If I trust You, everything else will become, for me, strength, health, and support. Everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust You, everything will be my destruction.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, pp.29-30

I was writing last week about suffering:

…the good God has in mind is far deeper than “making it all better”. He means to make us holy, and that is a terrible thing in itself. What makes it worse is that the further one allows oneself to be led along this path, the more one refuses anaesthetise the pain with the things of the world, the longer one realises the journey ahead to be...

It all comes down to trust in Christ’s mercy. Merton puts it so succinctly: “If I trust you… everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust You, everything will be my destruction.”

Once again, I’m brought to the realisation that, for me at least, the Jesus Prayer is the complete path to this trust, with its simple, plain appeal, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…”

Once we can trust, once we can give ourselves up (and this is the deepest meaning of this penitential season of Lent) in whatever act of surrender God has called us into, in the Jesus Prayer, in the Holy Rosary, in the faithful keeping of the Daily Office, then truly “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8.28 NRSV)