CowPi Journal

O wondrous exchange, eternal life is promised to us by the humility of the Lord, who bowed himself down to our pride.

— Saint Augustine, Confessions

Signposts point to where we want to go. Follow, or don’t follow. There are seven signposts listed below because seven is the number of completeness. No claim of originality is made for the signs, excerpt maybe for their grouping.

Keep hope alive.
Dare to trust.
Surrender to grace.
• • • Reflect love. • • •
Gravitate to humility.
Pray always.
All is gift.

Keep hope alive.
This signpost comes from a priest that used to be campus minister at the Mount. He would always sign the end of his letters with this. It is a reminder the importance of hope. Hope and faith are like two sides of the same coin. Sometimes faith seems hidden, so hope pulls you through the dark times. Sometimes hope seems lost, but faith pushes one through. Faith is the muscle, the driving force; hope is the spark of light that illuminates the way and warms a cold heart.

Dare to trust.
This signpost is a shortened form of “dare to move faith to trust” as described in the short essay, “It is Not About Belief” by Jon Zuck. Believing in God is one thing; trusting God is another. Both are part of faith, but the real test of faith is not believing, it is trusting. There are times when nothing in your experience will confirm, support, or backup faith. The world says one thing; faith says another. Which one do you trust? In the Gospels, Jesus implies trust when He talks about faith.

Surrender to grace.
This signpost comes from a line in the book, The Lord by Romano Guardini. (An excellent book that contains short reflections on nearly every episode of Jesus’ life in Scripture.) Although the sentence was referencing something specific, it applies to everyting. God’s grace rains (or reigns?) down upon us every second to open our eyes to see Him and His love for us, and calls us into a deeper relationship with Him. We resist. We need to stop resisting. “Surrender” can also mean “abiding” as referred to in St. John’s Gospel.

Surrender to grace can also mean to stop resisting the present moment. Enough grace will be given to you to get through whatever you need to do. In other words, do what is right when you see that something or someone must be attended to—this is an opportunity given to you to love and God will help you through it.

• • • Reflect love. • • •
The center signpost. There is a signpost for hope and one for faith (trust). Love of course needs to be included. And being the greatest of the three, plus a direct reference to the nature of God, it has the three bullets highlighting it. All signposts ultimately point to this place. We are not the source of love. God is. We do not possess love. Love possesses us. We do not create love. We channel love. And love, unlike the limited nature of material things, grows as it is shared.

Scripture says we are made in the image of God. This means two things, and both are equally correct. One, we are created as a copy—a person imprinted or made from an impression from a master image, the master image of who/what God is. (Note, this does not mean we are gods. We have attributes like God, beings with a will and an intellect.) Two, we are an image as in a reflection—we reflect the image of God to others. This synchronizes with what St. Teresa of Avila said about prayer as us looking at God looking at us. Another metaphor is that God throws us a ball called Love—are we going to keep it or are we going to throw it back to God through the next person?

Gravitate to humility.
This signpost points to the First Beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit. Scripture and all of the saints and mystics call us to humility. Not humility as the world defines it, that is, as a sense of proper self-esteem where one does not elevate or demean ones self in relation to others. This is important, but Christian humility aims for the complete and total nothingness of pride. We have nothing to boast of to God. We have no entitlements or any thing to lay claim on God. We are nothing without God. All we can really ask for is mercy. (See the story of the Canaanite women begging Jesus to heal her daughter.) The verb “gravitate” implies that we should keep moving toward humility.

Pray always.
This signpost comes from Scripture. It is a reminder to be aware of God’s presence, our be-withness with God, throughout our whole day, every day.

All is gift.
This signpost points to the attitude of gratitude. Many people say “everything is gift,” but the word “all” is more encompassing. “All” includes all—every thing, every person, every breath, molecule, and energy of your very existence, every opportunity to choose to love and to give. The words from Scripture, “In Him we live and move and have our being” are not only poetic, but are actual physical reality. This signpost also points to humility. (See the post “Certainty” for more.)

Keep hope alive  ·  Dare to trust  ·  Surrender to grace
• • • Reflect love. • • •
Gravitate to humility  ·  Pray always  ·  All is gift

From Br. Joseph —

Here is a simple prayer to start each day during Lent. As with all prayer, liturgy, worship, and spiritual reading, it is to draw us deeper into relationship with God, our Father.

Father, I call upon You to be with me.
I invite You into my heart,
     into my life,
     into everything I am and do.
I know that You are here already,
     but I want to be aware of You,
     to listen to You, to be with You.
Help me to be open to You now
     and throughout this day.
May Your love, peace, and energy
     touch my heart in faith and hope.
Amen.

Holy Cross be my light.

I discovered an essay titled “Hope” almost a month ago. I do not normally write in response to other people’s writing, and I am reluctant to even post this now, but the tone of the essay bothered me because it seemed to pit hope and faith against each. I agree with many of the statements in regards to faith, but many of the attributes assigned to hope are better suited to doubt. (What follows comes from an email I sent to the author.)

Faith does not struggle with hope. Faith is not tested or refined by hope. It is doubt. It is doubt that “scrutinizes faith, its object.” The object of hope is outward, upward, onward, forward. It is doubt that “doubts the vehicle of faith long before even looking at its content.” It is doubt that pursues “abstractions and test hypotheses offered by faith, offered on faith.” And it is doubt that whithers away at the plausibility of faith’s statements and weakens its ties to authority, to the past, and to the collective.

Faith must have a boundary upon which to form itself like the banks of a river, to resist and push against. Doubt, not hope, is this boundary. Doubt is the edge, the friction that shapes and sharpens faith. It is doubt that whittles away much of the content of faith until it is tested, purified like gold in the furnace. Doubt reminds faith that it cannot guarantee anything, and an honest faith learns and knows this. It is hope that pushes or pulls faith back into the struggle with doubt.

Hope, pure hope that is, has no “intellectual and intuitive content.” It just is. Hope has no past; it lives only in the now, in the present moment, and looks toward the future. As the original essay points out, the past is part of where faith draws its strength. It is hope that keeps faith alive when faith’s reliance on authority and the past dissolves from inconsistency and paradox.

At times, hope blazes bright as the noonday sun. At other times, hope is the tiny spark of light in a cave of total and complete darkness. Hope lights the path for the weak legs of faith to walk, often with barely enough light for the next step. And when there is no light for hope to lead by, it is the strength of faith that takes the next step into the darkness until hope is rekindled.

Yes, “hope is more difficult to maintain than faith.” And yes, hope would conclude that “only in suffering and anguish can anything authentic emerge.” But hope knows this is what helps purify itself and its friend faith.

Faith and doubt face each other in opposition. Faith and hope stand shoulder-to-shoulder together, as a team, looking onward, looking forward. Often faith wants to look back, and that is when doubt slaps faith in the face or causes faith to stumble. Hope reminds faith to keep looking forward. When doubt overshadows faith, hope lights the way for faith to see. When doubt overshadows hope, faith carries hope while rekindling its flame. Hope keeps faith alive and gives direction; faith rekindles hope when all seems lost.

Sören Kierkegaard wrote, “When a spider plunges from a fixed point to its consequences, it always sees before it an empty space where it can never set foot, no matter how it wriggles.” It is the combination of both faith and hope that sees into the empty space and lets the spider take the plunge. If the spider was either faithless or hopeless, it would be helpless.

My apologies if this response is not received with the charity and compassion it was intended. It is written by one who has been at one time hopeless, and at another time faithless.

Keep hope alive. Dare to move faith to trust.

P.S. For another perspective on faith and hope, I recommend Charles Péguy’s marvelous poem, “Master of the Three Virtues”.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him, that in the end, the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (p.901)