CowPi Journal

From Happy Catholic, via Flos Carmeli, via Summa Minutiae, here is a blogger challenge: Describe yourself with three quotes—serious, ironic, humorous, whatever—from various (literary?) sources.

My quotes:

Life is a gift, not to possess, but to share. — Henri Nouwen

If I am not [in God’s grace], may it please God to put me in it; if I am, may it please God to keep me there. — St. Joan of Arc

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it. — Richard Feynman

The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God’s love; but if the soul cannot yet feel this longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God. — Meister Eckhart

Maiken at A Case of Me isn’t “feeling all that Jesus-y lately”. She has doubts, and they scare her. Reminds of me (and a very dear friend). She writes:

At the worst moments I scare myself with thinking: “imagine if in ten years time you’re not a Christian!” … At my best moments I believe it’s God allowing me to experience doubts in order to create a deeper hunger for a fuller relationship with and dependency upon the Son.

Rick left the following comment on her weblog that resonates with me:

My experience has been that God entered into my questions more fully when I ALLOWED myself to ASK the questions. God is with you. This is a place of maturing and growing in your life. You will fall more deeply in love with God as you discover that the less you know ABOUT God the more that you may actually KNOW God.

For so long I FEARED doubt, uncertainty, and wonder. I sensed that I was “spitting” in God’s face; that I was turning my back on Jesus. Just the very fact that you are concerned and care is a good indication that you are not turning away from God. You may be turning from certain BELIEFS, but those beliefs are not God, they are beliefs about God. God is. “Tell them I AM sent you”.

I learned that I was truly entering into the Mystery of God…it was like getting out of the boat that held my understanding of God, removing my life-preserver and entering into the warm water which IS God—rather than fearfully and frantically flapping my arms and swimming back toward the boat to prevent myself from drowning. I learned to relax and calm-down and just float in the Sea of the Mystery where the Water holds me and bathes me in real love. I used the think the boat WAS God, The boat only supported me until I was ready to float on my own.

God is holding you. Allow the water to wash over you and bathe you.

Learning to float, especially when your feet can’t touch the bottom, is a hard thing to do, even more so if you can’t “feel” God’s presence holding you. But as Rick said, God is, whether or not we know or feel it.

Maiken, and the rest of us wrestling with doubts and questions and uncertainty, will be okay as long as God does not ask us what Bill Cosby said that God asked Noah in trying to convince him to build the ark—“Noah, how long can you tread water?”

We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. — Thomas Merton

The following story and commentary by Ronald Rolheiser, in Against an Infinite Horizon, has completely pushed my understanding of sin to new depths, depths that bring tears to my eyes in regards to my own sinful and broken nature. Fr. Rolheiser recounts a story told by James Mackey about a man who went on a hunting expedition in Africa:

One morning this man left the camp early, by himself, and hiked several miles into the jungle, where he surprised and eventually bagged two wild turkeys. Buckling his catch to his belt, he headed back for camp. At a point, however, he sensed he was being followed. With his senses sharpened by fright, he stopped, hands on his rifle, and looked around him. His fears were dispelled when he saw who it was. Following him at a distance was a naked and obviously starved adolescent boy. The boy’s objective was food, not threat. Seeing this, the man stopped, unbuckled his belt, and letting the turkeys fall to the ground, backed off and gestured to the boy that he could come and take the birds. The boy ran up to the two birds but, inexplicably, refused to pick them up. He was, seeming, still asking for something else. Perplexed, the man tried both by words and by gestures to indicate to the boy that he could have the birds. Still the boy refused to pick them up. Finally, in desperation, unable to explain what he still wanted, the boy backed off several meters from the dead birds and stood with outstretched and open hands…waiting, waiting until the man came and placed the birds in his hands. He had, despite his hunger, fear, and intense need, refused to take the birds. He waited until they were given to him; he received them.

(more…)

The experience of losing your faith, or of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this. I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

— Flannery O’Connor

Have you ever had to reformat your computer hard drive? For whatever reason, the darn thing needs to be reformatted, that is, everything, all your programs, files, pictures, music—everything—is lost and needs to be reloaded. Now, if everything has been properly backed up, it becomes a minor inconvenience. If not, then each program, each file, each piece of data, is worried over. Is it lost? Do I have a copy somewhere? Everything that you can remember that was on the old hard drive needs to be evaluated to see if it is worth it. Is it worth the time and effort of painstakingly relocating it, and then reloading it back onto the hard drive? Do I really need each piece of the old stuff cluttering up my newly cleaned and reformatted hard drive?

In a way, reformatting a hard drive gets rid of a lot of clutter—useless or outdated stuff. It is a painful process. Maybe some good things were lost, but now everything is fresh and clean and ready to start again—made new again.

Something like this has happened to me and faith.

(more…)