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
becoming flame 