We would be,
all of us,
detained at heaven’s border,
seeking life,
fleeing death,
illegal immigrants all;Detained and
forever separated
from our loved ones;Were it not
for God’s outrageous mercy,
his willingness to spend
without limit
his very life
for us
so that we
could be
not only citizens of his realm,
but his very sons and daughters,
sharing his home,
his table,
his very life.dw
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God himself is never safe from us…He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down…in the hungry people we do not have to feed…in the lonely people we do not have to comfort…in all the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “The Face in the Sky”
I recently finished reading the complete short stories of Flannery O’Connor. Her stories have always been a mystery to me, but I love her writing. Today I’m sharing an extended quote from one of my favorites, Revelation.
I’m also sharing some music I posted some time ago on my other site, dwpianomusic.com. The piece is called The Strongest Prayer I Know. The third “movement” of that piece is, in my mind, firmly tied to and inspired by this passage from O’Connor. It is the victory recessional, a cortege for all whose shortcomings and sufferings in this life are finally burned away as they climb through the “field of living fire…upward into the starry field…shouting hallelujah.” In my imagination, included (maybe at the very front) are the “little ones” I refer to in that post. Read Full Article
Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind…this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “The Face in the Sky”
In Common
So many grieving
Damage recent and long past
Near and far awaydw
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For those of us who grieve, Andy Raine of the Northumbria Community has written,
We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
I am not a Roman Catholic; reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not something that would have ever occurred to me to do. But I kept running into Catholic writers, one after another, who wrote about faith and life with a richness I hadn’t seen before: Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, James Martin, and Jean Vanier to name a few. So I spent several years looking into Roman Catholicism in depth, which included reading through the Catechism…twice.
