neither affect nor reason; neither personal conviction nor empirical objective

THOU: these weeks when I think of you, it is to say I know, I know. I know what you want from me--a pure accepting simple love--it is very simple. But I have these questions, Lord, in my heart, and the answers you have led me towards are terrifying. So I pass by you several times a day without speaking to you, and I look at you solely from the peripheries of my vision, for whenever I look at you directly, I'm overwhelmed by mourning and I can't understand what this mourning is. I feel as though I am no longer grieving for Maribel alone, but for all of terrorized humanity. All the writhing bodies pierced by swords, all the mothers and friends pierced by darkness.

There are many reasons why I didn't see the magnitude of human suffering before now. I have become very skilled at not seeing it, at playing to my own comfort: we know this. Of course I still don't see it, I am still immune to its immensity, but I have been touched--pierced--by the evil that tore into Maribel, and now I see bloodletting everywhere.

Funny thing, Lord. I thought I had time, yet, in your cradle. You said "I will fill your mouth with milk," and I thought you were telling me to slow down and grow strong. I thought you might shake me from slumber, eventually, as our relationship grew, and I even thought I was doing all I needed to do to hear you, when it happened. So what if I was mostly lazy about praying or self-discipline. I thought: everyone is lazy. So what if I'd begun to use you as the source of my own comfort. I thought: everyone loves consolation, especially God. So what if the vow I was about to make was for my own healing. I thought: say the word, Lord, and I shall be healed.

So now I am getting to know you, and I am learning that you are indeed a bloody bloody God. There is no way around this. It is not comfortable. The meaning of the body is not spirit. The meaning of the body is existence, yours, mine, everybody's. The meaning of the body is the cross. I don't know exactly what this entails, but I am beginning to glimpse it, and it is very painful. Very painful.

Frankly, Lord, growing up the first time was hard. I don't relish a second childhood. I am not saying I won't accept it. I am not saying I don't trust you. I am saying I understand my denial is thick and full of self-obscurity, full of you-obscurity. I am saying I think I understand what might be at stake in bringing me towards a clearer perception of you, and I am terrified of what is to come. I am beginning to see that pain is the language of the child. And I am saying I expect to go after you--I am longing to go after you--yet I also expect I will do it, but for your grace, kicking and screaming the whole way. Well, I've never been quick with my fiat, have I. Forgive me for what I predict I will do, when I do it. Forgive me for knowing better and doing it anyway. Didn't H and I like to say that the source of the greatest evil is cowardice? Is it right to ask you to help me be quick and brave? --Or is this another weak distortion of a better prayer?

I am more saddened to know that the answer to my prayer required an assassin and another terrible sacrifice. --That you permitted it, on some level, for my sake. And I see you are waiting on me, but I am very slow. And I am noisy. I can't stop these crying jags which leave us both in the same place, with me withdrawing finally towards work and composure and the compartment of another day, and with you waiting in the eaves wherever I have left off. I am learning this about you. You are a God of waiting.

Thank you for waiting. It's going to be awhile.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

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"If there is something essentially sick about your conception of faith you will never be a contemplative.

Here are some of the wrong notions of what faith is.

First of all, it is not an emotion, not a feeling. It is not a blind sub-conscious urge towards something vaguely supernatural. It is not simply an elemental need in man's spirit. It is not a feeling that God exists. It is not a conviction that one is somehow saved or 'justified' for no special reason except that one happens to feel that way. It is not something entirely interior and subjective, with no reference to any external motive. It is not something that bubbles up out of the recesses of your soul and fills you with an indefinable 'sense' that everything is all right. It is not something so purely yours that its content is incommunicable. It is not some personal myth of your own that you cannot share with anyone else, and the objective validity of which does not matter either to you or God or anybody else.

But also it is not an opinion. It is not a conviction based on rational analysis. It is not the fruit of scientific evidence. You can only believe what you do not know. As soon as you know it, you no longer believe it, at least not in the same way as you know it.

Faith is first of all an intellectual assent. It perfects the mind, it does not destroy it. It puts the intellect in possession of Truth which reason cannot grasp by itself. It gives us certitude concerning God as He is in Himself; faith is the way to a viatl contact with a God Who is alive, and not to the view of an abstract First Principle worked out by syllogisms from the evidence of created things."

--Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation

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