The Beginning of a Journey

"We are called upon to live Christ's life. We are called into the desert to meet the demon within. We are called to face God alone in the night of our own solitude. We are called to die with Jesus, in order to live with him. We are asked to lose all, to be emptied out, in order to be filled with the very fullness of God."

from James Finley's book on Thomas Merton,
Merton's Palace of Nowhere, p.17



I begin this journal with much tension in my mind and heart. The past several months have been haunted by spiritual sickness, delusion, and bouts of prayerlessness. It is a season of longing even as it is a season of distance and loneliness from God. I need confess these things to you so that you know as well as I do how destitute we are --- pointing fingers at the moon and marveling...but it is this simple task that I must constantly return to, I must repent toward, a place of awe and honesty, integrity and relationship to the One Who hides his face. I hope that you could take these feeble steps with me.

Someone recently said that the whole of "spiritual life" is re-discovering Jesus for the first time over and again. It brought me great comfort because I often feel this way as a result of my waywardness and apathy, my deeper cynicisms and overbearing ego. I have been trying to keep my mind on God because I seem to remember what it was like to rest in the goodness of love, of being embraced by more than the idea of being alive, by meeting each breath with the sense of its gift, its secret, its promise. God sweeps me back to Him, gathering the fractures of me like a pile of wretched leaves...He breathes life and scatters me about in the great dance, to love and cherish the smiling faces of trees with proud and deep voices. He brings me back to the source of this.

In a flash we can remember these things. For me, it is imperative that I curse competition with other men, that I forget theology and the masquerades of my ego that play out a slide-show of grim thoughts of self-importance, self-righteousness and intelligence. The false self is the one who hides beneath this slide-show and pretends to be active within it. The truth is, the bastard is terrified to touch anything of this life, for the Reality and power of honest love and sexuality would consume him, expose him, speak of his deceit.

My great wish is to desire a true indigence, a poverty of the self that is fixated entirely upon the beauty and truth in Jesus. I ask God to teach me contemplation and how to stay with Him.

There is nothing more to write this evening, so I leave you with a poem by the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, from which this website gets its address.

"Faith is a Blush"

God
is unwilling to be alone
and man
cannot forever remain impervious
to what He longs to show.
Those of us who cannot keep their striving back
find themselves at times
within the sight of the unseen
and become aglow with its rays
Some of us blush,
others wear a mask.
Faith is a blush in the presence of God.