Category: Inspiration

Today I’m pondering the gift of faith.  We receive this gift with our baptism whether if this be in church or a river. 

St Thomas More said, “The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.” The soul has to undergo tremendous mortifications at first, and then more refined detachments, until finally its Divine image is revealed. Because mortification is recognized as a practice of death, there is fittingly inscribed in Latin on the tomb of John Duns Scotus, “twice died, but buried only once.”

Anxiety and peace.  Fear and faith. Am I living well in the balance of “and” today? I’m learning that I really don’t like “in between” but in this vulnerable place, I hold the tension of “and.” This is the holy space in the middle of things despite my wanting to be firmly placed in what I deem “the better side.”

All of us live with the unsettling reality that at some point, our life will cease to be as we know it.  We know in our bones: no matter how good, beautiful, true, or exciting a thing or state of affairs is here below, it is destined to pass into nonbeing.

As I examine my life, I see it littered with little sufferings. Some are simple—interruptions, inconveniences, annoyances. Some are a bit bigger—a family member’s health crisis, financial difficulties, a job that is not fulfilling my expectations, or watching your child grow into adulthood —beyond the suffering and illness and even death. Trauma, tragedy, it’s all there no matter what our vocational state—suffering is part of all lives.

God invites us to have it be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Most of us see these two realms as interpenetrating fields of force where heaven, the arena of God and the angels, touches upon and calls out to earth, the arena of humans, animals, plants, and planets.

We are not to be afraid. 

When we fear, we cling to who we are and what we have; we see ourselves as the threatened center of a hostile universe. Fear is the “original sin” of which the Church Fathers speak. Fear is the poison that was injected into human consciousness and human society from the beginning.