Doubt

Trinity A: Together

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Celtic TrinityOLD TESTAMENT:  Genesis 1:1-2:4a

To read the Old Testament Lectionary passage, click here

The writing that we know as The Book of Genesis is actually a composite of three (or possibly more) unrelated oral traditions—Yahwist (J) (10th century bce), Elohist (9th century bce, and Priestly (P) (about 5th century bce).  Each have a different understanding of God and a different focus.  It is important when we read it that we remember that, for all practical purposes, we come as aliens to the culture in which it was written.  This is a story through which we can understanding humanity’s beginnings.

Genesis makes the first claim about God’s character, God’s relationship to the world, and God’s relationship to humanity and to us as individuals.  So, Genesis is not a book that provides easy, historical lessons to life’s questions.  Genesis is an experience that you have to enter.  Theodore Hiebert says of the book:  “Genesis shares the scientist’s fascination with the birth of the cosmos and the origin of life on earth, the anthropologists’ curiosity about the first human beings, the historian’s interest in the beginning of civilization, a family’s esteem for their earliest ancestors, and the theologian’s concern about the founding events of religious traditions.”

To claim that God created the world and all that exists is a matter of faith, grounded fundamentally in God’s self-revelation.  At this level, the opening chapters of Genesis are a confession of faith.  In the passage, the phrase “in the beginning” probably does not refer to the absolute beginning, but to the beginning of ordered creation.  After all, God was there as well as chaos!  “Heaven and earth” is probably not intended to be two separate places but a reference to the totality of Creation.  In fact, Norman Habel contends that this verse IS the account of Creation, followed by a more detailed account in the form of an inclusion.

Light here is not sunlight, but a pushing back of the darkness with life.  The phrase “it was good” does not imply perfection, but rather implies the fulfillment of divine intention.  It was not perfect; it was the way it was meant to be.

According to ancient Israel cosmology, the dome is an impermeable barrier that holds back a great reservoir of water in the sky, separating it from the great reservoir under the earth.  When the “windows of the sky” (7:11) are opened in the Priestly flood story, the water in this reservoir falls as rain.

In verses 11-13, there is a shift in God’s way of creating; the earth itself participates in the creative process.  The description of the plants and trees with their capacity to reproduce by themselves gives evidence for a probing interest in what we would call “natural science”.  (Keep in mind that when this was written, there was no understanding of photosynthesis.  It was ascribed to the powers of the earth.)

“Let us”—refers to an image of God as a consultant of other divine beings.  God is not alone but chooses to share Creation with what God has created.  In the phrase “In our image, according to our likeness”, image should not be construed as identity.  The image functions to mirror God to the world, to be God as God would be to the nonhuman, to be an extension of God’s own dominion.  We are not created to be God.  Think of a photograph, an “image” of the subject in the picture.  The “image” is NOT the subject; it is rather a reminder, something that points to and makes the subject more real.

Abraham Heschel said that “Eternal life does not grow away from us; it is “planted within us, growing beyond us.” (Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath, 74).  The divine resting concludes creation—namely, Sabbath belongs to the created order; it cannot be legislated or abrogated by human beings.  “Finishing” does not mean that God has quit creating.  The seventh day refers to a specific day and not to an open future.  Continuing creative work will be needed, but there is a “rounding off” of the created order at this point.

Also according to Heschel, “The Sabbath is a reminder of the two worlds—this world and the world to come; it is an example of both worlds.  For the Sabbath is joy, holiness, and rest; joy is part of this world; holiness and rest are something of the world to come…The Sabbath is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below and what is above.  All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God.  This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe…“There are two aspects to the Sabbath, as there are two aspects to the world.  The Sabbath is meaningful to [us] and is meaningful to God….The Sabbath is holy by the grace of God, and is still in need of all the holiness which man may lend to it…Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath while still in this world, unless one is initiated in the appreciation of eternal life, one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.  Sad is the lot of [those] who have no power to perceive the beauty of the Sabbath…” (Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath, 19, 31-32, 53-54, 74)

The high point of Creation is the Sabbath, which is delight in God, one another, and Creation.  It is where it all comes together.  This is the revealing of the God who made us, who conversed with us and with all of Creation even from the beginning, and who saw something in the world that we have not yet been able to see—an order and equality and justice that has been there from the very beginning.  And God saw that it was good. 

  1. What is your response to this passage?
  2. What stands out the most for you?
  3. What do you think is the central point of Creation?
  4. What does the “Sabbath” mean for you?
  5. Why do you think we read this passage in this week in which we are remembering and celebrating the Trinity?  

 

NEW TESTAMENT:   2 Corinthians 13:11-13

To read the Lectionary Epistle passage, click here

This passage is the concluding admonition for this entire second letter to the Church at Corinth.  The “holy kiss”, which is probably a little odd-sounding to us, was essentially a known and usual social convention that Paul has brought into practice in his churches.  The “holy” reference suggests that it was a social convention that was assumed into the church and made acceptable as an intimate greeting.  It became the demonstration of love and peace between members.  The extension “be with all of you” once again affirms that all the Corinthians stand on the same ground (no one is better than the next) and that they belong to one another because of God’s love, the grace in and from Christ, and the fellowship generated by the Holy Spirit.

This short passage is about relationship, that sense of unity that comes from being one with God and one with God’s people.  Kissing, of course, connotes real intimacy. It is closer than just being friends.  It means entering each others’ lives and becoming part of each other.  Although this isn’t a specifically “trinitiarian” text in the classic sense of what that means, it still depicts that close relationship, inseparable and mutual, without any part of the relationship being held above the other.  It depicts who we are called to be and how we are to relate to others within this Kingdom of God in which we already reside. 

  1. What does this closing admonition mean for us?
  2. How can we “live in peace” when there is so much disunity, strife, and suffering in the world?

 

GOSPEL:  Matthew 28:16-20

To read the Lectionary Gospel passage, click here

This is the first scene in which the disciples have appeared since they fled during the arrest of Jesus.  Jesus appears to them and they “see” him.  There is also the element of doubt.  But Jesus comes to this somewhat wavering church and speaks.  The basis for the words of The Great Commission is the claim of that risen Jesus that all authority has been given to him by God.  The commission is to all the “nations”.  The “nations” are to be discipled—go, make, baptize, teach.  Essentially, Jesus has handed the authority given to him by God to those whom he has commissioned.  Jesus’ last words are a promise of his continuing presence during the church’s mission.

When we look more deeply at this passage, we see that there are actually several different ways to translate the phrase “but some doubted”.  To whom do we think the word “some” refers?  We would like to think that it was those outside of the small circle of disciples, those that did not know Jesus as well in the first place.  It is easy, then, for us to dismiss this doubting as unfounded and even wrong.  But this phrase can also be translated as “but some of them doubted”, implying that there were some of Jesus’ inner circle of disciples that had their doubts.  That becomes a little bit more difficult for us to swallow.  After all, if THEY had doubts, where does that leave us?  Or maybe the passage is then saying, “hey, THEY, even they, had doubts; maybe doubting is alright”.  It is no longer a phrase that condemns doubting but rather affirms that it exists.  In the New American Bible, however, it is translated “but they doubted”, meaning that all of the disciples were both worshipping and doubting, doubting and worshipping.  Maybe this is saying that doubt is the norm, something that is perhaps even expected to happen.  Here, doubt is not skepticism or unbelief but rather a part of discipleship itself.  It is a part of what it means to be the church—worshipping and doubting, doubting and worshipping.

Whatever the nature of the resurrection event, it did not generate perfect faith even in those who experienced it firsthand.  It is not to perfect believers that the mission of Jesus Christ is entrusted but to the worshipping and wavering community of disciples.

Hans Kung says this:  Doubt is the shadow cast by faith.  One does not always notice it, but it is always there, though concealed.  At any moment it may come into action.  There is no mystery of the faith which is immune to doubt.

Faith in the resurrection is a matter of worship, not of inference.  But it does not exclude doubt, but takes doubt into itself.  The Great Commission, then, is given to all of us worshipping and doubting believers.

But, ultimately, doubts are supposed to be resolved, right?  With careful study of the Scriptures, everything becomes clear, right?  Well, let me tell you, I have a Masters of Divinity degree on my wall.  And, sadly, I have to tell you…that I do not have all the answers.  That’s not the way it works.  You know what intense theological study does for you?  It doesn’t give you all the answers; it teaches you how to ask the questions.

Part of Jesus’ directive to the disciples was to “teach”.  How do you teach, how do you learn, without asking questions?  Constructive doubt is what forms the questions in us and leads us to search and explore our own faith understanding.  It is doubt that compels us to search for greater understanding of who God is and who we are as children of God.  And it is in the face of doubt that our faith is born.  God does not call us to a blind, unexamined faith, accepting all that we see and all that we hear as unquestionable truth; God instead calls us to an illumined doubt, through which we search and journey toward a greater understanding of God.

So can we live amidst the shadows, the doubts, the varying shades of grey?  Think about different amounts of sunlight.  We have difficulty living in darkness.  We try desperately to artificially light our way or find some way to compensate for our blindness.  But full sunlight is also blinding.  Our eyes cannot take it.  It is those cloudy, gray days that allow us to see the best.  Overcast days are a photographer’s dream.  It is the light mixed with shadows that provides the most clarity and allows every color of the prism to be illumined on its own.

Faith is like that.  For here we have not human truth which we can understand and prove but God’s truth.  True faith is never completely clear.  It remains obscure.  It is always intermingled with shadows and doubts that open our eyes to the only way to deal with them—not by proving them wrong but by looking to God for the light that will make them part of our faith.  “But some doubted”.  They were the ones that saw him and worshipped him and whose faith grew.  They were the ones that were blessed with that reasonable doubt.  It’s called faith.  Thanks be to God!

So, what does this all have to do with the Trinity?  Well, keep in mind that the Trinity is not a doctrine that is perfectly laid out in the Scriptures.  It is rather a human construct that for us Trinitarian Christians represents the fullest understanding of God that we can imagine.  Think of it like this…In the beginning was God.  God created everything that was and everything that is and laid out a vision for what it would become.  But we didn’t really get it.  So God tried and tried again to explain it.  God sent us Abraham and Moses and Judges and Kings and Prophets.  But we still didn’t get it.  God wove a vision of what Creation was meant to be and what we were meant to be as God’s children through poetry and songs and beautiful writings of wisdom.  But we still didn’t get it.

“So,” God thought, “there is only one thing left to do.  I’ll show you.  I’ll show you the way to who I am and who I desire you to be.  I will walk with you.”  So God came, Emmanuel, God-with-us, and was born just like we were with controversy and labor pains and all those very human conceptions of what life is.  Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, was the Incarnation of a universal truth, a universal path, the embodiment of the way to God and the vision that God holds for all of Creation.  But we still didn’t get it.  We fought and we argued and we held on to our own human-contrived understandings of who God is.  And it didn’t make sense to us.  This image of God did not fit into our carefully-constructed boxes.  And so, as we humans have done so many times before and so many times since, we destroyed that which got in the way of our understanding.  There…it was finished…we could go back to the way it was before.

But God loves us too much to allow us to lose our way.  And so God promised to be with us forever.  Because now you have seen me; now you know what it is I intended; now you know the way.  And so I will always be with you, always inside of you, always surrounding you, always ahead of you, and always behind you.  There will always be a part of me in you.  Come, follow me, this way.  Be with me.  Be who I know you can be. 

  1. What meaning does this passage hold for you?
  2. What does the “doubt” mean for you here?
  3. What does “faith” mean for you here?
  4. Taking all three of these Scriptures, what do you think we’re supposed to make of the Trinity? 

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so do not waste too much time protecting the boxes.  (Richard Rohr)

 

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession.  It is an on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all.  Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway—a journey without maps.  Tillich said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.  (Frederick Buechner)

 

So much depends on our idea of God!  Yet no idea of [God], however pure and perfect, is adequate to express who [God] really is.  Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about [God].  We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good.  [God’s] inscrutable love seeks our awakening. (Thomas Merton) 

 

Closing

God to enfold me, God to surround me, God in my speaking, God in my thinking.

God in my sleeping, God in my waking, God in my watching, God in my hoping.

God in my life, God in my lips, God in my soul, God in my heart.

God in my sufficing, God in my slumber, God in mine ever-living soul, God in mine eternity.

 

God our Creator, today you bring us to a new stage of our journey to you;  May the presence of your Son guide us, the love of your Spirit enlighten us, until we come at last to you, God blessed for ever and ever.  Amen.

 

(From A Celtic Primer, compiled by Brendan O’Malley, p. 150-151, 60.)

A Programming Note:

Sorry I have been “missing in action” for so many weeks.  Life has been a whirlwind and sometimes a blur.  I’ve journeyed to a place that I did not see coming but I am good.  So, I’ll commit to getting back to this on a regular basis, as well as posting on my Dancing to God blog at http://www.dancingtogod.com.  I hope you’ll check that out too. Thank you for being a part of my journey!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Proper 22C: How Much Faith is Enough?

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mustard-seed-piety-choi
“A Mustard Seed”, by Piety Choi (PietysArt.com)

FIRST LESSON:  Lamentations 1: 1-6

Read the passage from Lamentations

Lamentations is a book of poetry around the subject of unspeakable suffering.  In Hebrew, the name of the book means something like “funeral dirges”.  The writings come from a place of deep and profound hurt and, for that reason, the book is often considered on the margins of the liturgies of both Judaism and Christianity.  The book is actually a short collection of five poems in response to a national tragedy.  There is debate over which historical setting to which it is responding, but more than likely it was written in the aftermath of the Babylonian invasions of Jerusalem. (about 587 or 586 bce)  There was a real sense of just how God could have let this happen.  The primary speaker is an unknown narrator and the audience, too, is unidentified.  There is an overwhelming tone of sorrow and shame and a sense of nostalgia, a remembrance of what “was” (and perhaps what “could have been”).

Keep in mind that this is a people who have long seen themselves as “chosen” by God, as delivered by God from slavery in Egypt and led to a promised land, a people whose holy place was high upon a solid rock.  Israel had faith in God to protect them.  But now the temple mount has fallen (the first of several times, we know now).  The people of God had been given the promised land and they had filled it with their lives, their families, and their homes.  They had established the city of Jerusalem as the capital and built God a great Temple there.  But the city and the temple has now been desecrated by the Babylonians.  Life as they know it is gone.

The writings are riddled with the question “Where was God when all this was going on?”  The reading begins with a depiction of Jerusalem as one in misery, utterly alone, and with a precarious future.  When you get to the later verses, the grief almost becomes palpable—even the gates are desolate, perhaps hanging precariously from their hinges with no protection and no welcome.  And yet, there is a sense of owning of one’s guilt, of one’s part in what has happened.

National tragedies tend to render communities speechless.  The collective grief can be overwhelming.  We, too, have experienced that.  Lamentations names what is wrong, what is out of order in God’s world, what keeps human beings from thriving in all their creative potential.  Acts of lament expose these conditions.  They give us permission to cry, to grieve, perhaps to wail (the way African cultures do), to truly lament.

And even in the midst of darkness, the grieving community looks to God.  There is a realization that while circumstances may change, God is always present and is always steadfast.  Even in the darkest darkness, God is present.  The Book of Lamentations challenges us to reexamine what “blessed” means, what faith means.  It challenges our vision of that for which we hope—something beyond the way things were before.

Jesus wept, and in his weeping, he joined himself forever to those who mourn.

He stands now throughout all time, this Jesus weeping, with his arms about the weeping ones; “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted”.  He stands with the mourners, for his name is God-with-us.  Jesus wept.

 “Blessed are those who weep, for they shall be comforted.”  Someday.  Someday God will wipe the tears from Rachel’s eyes.

 In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life, there is a deafening alleluia rising from the souls of those who weep, and of those who weep with those who weep.  If you watch, you will see that hand of God putting the stars back in their skies one by one.  (From Psalms of Lament, by Ann Weems, xvi-xvii)

  • What is your response to this passage?
  • What benefit do you see for laments, for the naming of what is wrong?
  • Why is this so difficult for our society today?
  • What message of hope does this hold for you?

  

NEW TESTAMENT:  2 Timothy 1: 1-14

Read the New Testament passage

As we have said, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are known as the “pastoral epistles”.  Their main purpose was to establish a pattern of ministry and church structure, along with a pattern of “truth”, faith, and sound teaching.  Many try to take these together, but this can be misleading because 2 Timothy has a little bit different scope, focusing primarily on personal character of believers, rather than the patterns of the church.  Most scholars assume that these letters were not written by Paul but, rather, by a student or disciple of Paul’s.

In this week’s passage, the writer refers to the faith in which one has grown, the faith of his ancestors and then proclaims it to be a faith that is continued through the apostolic order, of which the liturgies and order is a part.  The writer doesn’t mean this to be looked upon as a “hand-me-down” faith, but one that is already there.  In essence, this writing is not refuting the forms of worship of the day or of one’s history, but simply infusing them with the Christian spirit—“in Christ Jesus”.  The writer talks of “rekindling” the gift of God that is in each of us, a spark that has been there all along.

The second part of the reading begins with the admonishment “do not be ashamed.”  This is odd-sounding to us, but first-century Mediterranean culture was very much an “honor-shame” society.  The social ethos encouraged the pursuit of works of honor.  So the writer is using it to depict that not acting in accordance with God’s calling and with one’s faith would bring shame.  We are told to join in suffering for the Gospel.

This is sort of a creedal-type statement which is a confession of God (not of Christ).  It lays out the Gospel as an account not so much of what Christ has done as of what God has done through Christ.  Faith is also depicted as a “deposit”, something that one initially had that now needs to be increased. It’s hard, though, to not read this as if faith is more formalized.  Instead of believing “in”, it almost admonishes us to believe “that”.

Depicted here is a faith that cannot be separated from one’s faith tradition.  But it means making sure that the connections are upheld and maintained and then passed on to the next generation.  It speaks of faith as a connectedness, an ongoing relationship with those before us, those after us, and all of those with whom we share community in this moment.

The Apostle Paul understands that there is no inherent conflict between the personal and communal aspects of faith. No human being is born an orphan. We are all born into a family. The Bantus of South Africa say, Umuntu, ngamuntu, ngabantu — a person is a person because of other persons. We are born into relationship, we grow and live in relationship and we die in relationship. Our modern Western notion of personal independence and psychic autonomy distorts the truth about us. Transposed into African, the sophisticated Cartesian formulation Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” would read Cognatus ergo sum, “I am related, therefore I am.” To the question “Who are you?” the African would answer, “I am my mother’s and father’s child, of the lineage of so-and-so, of the house of X and Y, of the tribe of Z.” By which time the impatient European or American has moved on to other matters. Yet the Bible is replete with such genealogical material, and even Jesus is situated in its repetitive detail.

Although faith challenges individuals, heroic individualism does not exhaust faith’s fullness and power. At its heart is the gift of memory, the ability to recall and reappropriate. Faith does not just arouse and satisfy the craving for individual gratification or fill our hunger for self-esteem, important as those things are. Faith connects us with others, grants us a name and an identity by which we can respond to God’s call, and assures us that others know that name. Thus is established the social roots of person-hood. When those roots are touched then the branches of my being stir in response. A baptismal is thus the symbol of our integrity, the cup of sacrament filled with the whole body. When Africans name a child at a dedication ceremony they think of it as giving life, the abundant life of relatedness.

And so the apostle affirms Timothy’s faith by a threefold naming — the names of his grandmother and mother and his own name. Wherever the faith has spread it has promoted and been promoted by this sense of names. As long as our names exist the church has hope of continuing community. (Lamin Sanneh, “Naming and the Act of Faith”, in The Christian Century, October 4, 1989, available at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=889, accessed 29 Sept 2010)

  • What meaning does this passage hold for you?
  • What do you think of this depiction of faith?
  • What does the notion of “sound teaching” mean to you?
  • What does this idea of the “handing down of faith” mean for you?

 

GOSPEL:  Luke 17:5-10

Read the Gospel passage

The Gospel passage for this week begins with a discussion of faith that plays right into what we read in the Epistle passage.  This section (including the four verses that come before) pull together four units of sayings:  a warning against causing others to stumble, a challenge to be forgiving, a call to exercise faith, and a reminder of the duties of discipleship.  Then the passage itself starts out with a reference to increasing one’s faith.

It is important to look at what comes before this.  Last week’s Scripture reflected the story of the rich man and Lazarus; and then in the first few verses of the seventeenth chapter of Luke, there are these teachings related to our concerns for the little ones in this world, for the ways we injure and sin against each other, and the call to forgive.  Forgive…There are so many needs in the world.  There is so much conflict.  How can we make it through?  We begin to understand and identify with the disciples’ request:  “Increase our faith.”  Help us get through this; give us strength; make it better; we know that you can make it better.  Because, going back even farther, if we can’t forgive, then we become “occasions for stumbling” for someone else.  Lord, help us!  Help us do what is right!

After all, that’s what we should do.  But then the next part of the passage comes into play.  If one is only doing what he or she SHOULD do (as in the servant), then why would the result include a reward?  If one is meeting expectation, then one is really just average.  For the writer of Luke, forgiving is what we should do.  We are not owed anything for doing that.  It is who we are.  It is the expectation.  It reaps no reward.  It is faith that gets us where we need to be.  God’s favor is an act of grace—unearned, unmerited, and, usually, undeserved.  The place at the table is a gift; it is not earned.

The biggest problem here is that the disciples have made faith a commodity, something that can be measured.  We do it too.  And that doesn’t really work when it comes to faith.  Think about it.  Faith is faith.  If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, a tiny speck of a thing, you have faith.  And if you have faith enough to move mountains, to overcome anything, you have faith.  It’s all the same thing.

Maybe the question is not how much we have but what it is.  In our world today, we seem to be bombarded with a theology of certitude, sort of a “my faith’s bigger than your faith” mentality, as if living the right way and dressing the right way and thinking the right way and voting the right way makes us somehow more faithful than someone else.  We live as if being sure of what we know and what we believe means that we have more faith, means that we’re somehow better or more advanced than those who doubt and continue to search.  But, again, what is faith?  I think it is trust in something so much bigger than we are that we cannot imagine it.  I think it is accepting a certainty in the existence of something of which we are a little (or maybe a whole lot) uncertain.  And I think it is, finally, realizing that we are not in full control of our lives, or our world, or our destiny, and that what we do is only a small piece of this veritable tapestry that is our world.

The only certainty that we really have is that faith involves uncertainty.  We are not called to a blind and unexamined faith but one that is illumined with all that God calls us to encounter in life.  “Increase our faith?”   What does that mean?  Remember, faith is faith.  You could say, then, that merely desiring faith is faith.  And desiring to increase one’s faith is a faithful and faith-filled response to God’s calling into relationship.  This is not a commodity nor is it a finished product that we must work to obtain.  Faith is faith.  Desiring faith is faith.  And “having faith” is not about faith at all.  Flannery O’Connor once said that “when we get our spiritual house in order, we’ll be dead.  This goes on.  You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness.  Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you.  It is trust not certainty.”

 

  • What meaning does this passage hold for you?
  • How prevalent do you think the thinking that we “earn” God’s love or that we “earn” heaven is today? What does that say about our faith?
  • What is faith to you?

 

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

There are two ways to slide easily through life:  to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking. (Theodore Rubin)

Faith listens to life and hears something new. Faith drifts off during a sermon and lands on new terrain. Faith sings a new song and suddenly knows more. Faith feeds a stranger and responds differently to one’s own meal. Faith makes wild leaps, risks strange thoughts, dashes outside the box, asks foolish questions, hears unexpected voices. Little by little, faith’s “whole being” grows deeper and deeper, broader and broader.  (Tom Ehrich, 12/09/2005, Listening Faith:  Teens and Others)

It’s when we learn faith that happiness comes—real happiness, that underlying descant of the soul that tells us over and over again that what is, in some strange, unexplainable way, is good.  Most of all, faith tells us that what is, is more than good.  It is becoming always better.  In ways we never thought possible.  And how can that be?  Because God’s ways are not our ways.  It is in the depths of darkness that we learn faith; it is in retrospect that we come to recognize love in darkness.  (Joan Chittister, Called to Question, 213)

 

Closing

Plunge into the Ocean of Love, where heart meets Heart, Where sorrows are comforted and wounds are mended.  There, melodies of sadness mingle with dolphin songs of joy; Past fears dissolve in deep harmonic tones, the future—pure mystery.  For eternal moments lived in total surrender glide smoothly over troubled waters.

Hide not from Love, O friends, sink not into the sea of despair, the mire of hatred.  Awaken, O my heart, that I drown not in fear!  Too long have I sailed where’ere the winds have blown!  Drop anchor!  O, Heart of all hearts, set a clear course, that I might follow!  Guide me to the Promised Shore!

Amen. (Nan Merrill, Psalms for Praying:  An Invitation to Wholeness, Psalm 137, p. 288.)