I found a first edition of Thomas Merton’s, Thoughts in Solitude, at a Used Book Sale awhile back. I’ve read a little Merton almost every day for several years now, so I was quite excited about the find and also about the price, $1.50. After a long week at work solitude seems a necessary prescriptive* so I’ve been reading and meditating on small passages. I am particularly drawn to this: “What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?” (p.31).
Not my will but thine be done and we are seized with Abrahamic faith, raising the knife poised to strike down our most cherished and dearly beloved, those very things, or ideas, or whatevers which are sign and the seal of our blessedness. Prayer is radical business. Growing in faith requires an ever deepening willingness to trust more and more of ourselves to God. Especially, the very things which we have come to believe are God’s special gifts for our lives and our living.
Today, I will pray to learn to trust my work to God, for in truth it is not mine but God’s work. All that I bring to it are God’s gifts to me and the doing is God’s blessing for my life. If this past week it seemed to big and too much and too many and more than I could imagine doing, and people somehow still felt cared for and felt compassion and knew grace and went home with a little bit more wholeness, and if God showed up and cradled us all in her hands and kept us safe it had little to do with me and everything to do with God. A miracle of grace in every group and pastoral-therapeutic encounter.
I pray for confidence in the coming days that whatever comes thy will will be done. Amen
*Truthfully however, this is a second-line medication, last night all I had the strength for was renting “Mall Cop” and watching it half comatose on the couch.
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