In Common
So many grieving
Damage recent and long past
Near and far awaydw
Copyright © 2018
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.
Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “Message in the Stars”
The Soul Behind My Sin
Can you see the soul behind my sin?
Will you see what God sees, deep within?
Can you love the soul you see
behind the mask that I call Me?
Will you love what I can’t love,
lift it to the throne of God?
Can you see the soul I’m meant to be?
What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle that we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.”
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “Message in the Stars”
