The most important thing I have read in the past two or so years is this: “For until we love God perfectly, His world is full of contradiction. The things He has created attract us to him and yet keep us away from Him. They draw us on and they stop us dead. We find Him in them to some extent and then we don’t find him in them at all…. In stead of worshiping God through His creation, we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of creatures. But to worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell,” (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation).
There are so many things in which I have desired know Him, so many places I have looked for Him. All those things are gone, lost to me, and the places, too, are vanished from my sight. And for so long to lose so much seemed assurance of such forsakenness that I could not comprehend. “Why have You forsaken me?” in every place I have gone looking for You.
But it is I who has forsaken Him. Isn’t that the promise of the Cross and its victory over death and sorrow, suffering and pain. It is I who am only now finding the courage to trust what is offered. It is precisely in forsakenness that I will find Him. Such is the depth of His compassion, to choose freely to meet us at the point of our deepest need for Him. All we need to do is to ask His grace to choose freely to forsake our desperate searching and yearning for all that is lost and to draw closer in surrender to our perfect love for Him. Amen.
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