CowPi Journal

There are times in life when a person has to rush off in pursuit of hopefulness.

— Jean Giono, afterword to The Man Who Planted Trees

I want to run and go search for it, but I know it is right here, if I look.

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)

From Br. Joseph —

The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater. (Peter Kreeft)

There is a grove of aspen trees that cover nearly 200 acres in south-central Utah. This grove, named “Pando”, was once considered the largest living organism in the world. Above ground, each tree looks like an isolated, individual entity, but underground, there is a vast network of roots that interconnects all of the 47,000+ individual trees. It just so happens that aspens, although they generate seeds, prefer to reproduce almost entirely vegetatively, with suckers sprouting from the existing root systems. What looks to us as a bunch of separate, individual, free-standing trees is in fact one gigantic organism. What we see appears to be only part of the story, only one small view point of reality.

The same thing goes for us humans too. We are not only connected in our common humanity, but we are connected on a much deeper, spiritual, essential level. Our very being, our existence, is connected. I cannot affect you without you affecting me as you cannot affect me without affecting yourself.

Ultimately, this connection is in and through and of God. Scripture uses several metaphors for this fact, most notably when Christ calls Himself the Vine and we his branches, or as St. Paul calls us, members (parts) of the Body of Christ. If we take it a step further beyond the horizon of life, those that have died are *still* alive and active branches on the Vine too. In fact, they are more alive than we are here on earth because they are closer to the very Source of Life.

This point of view of our existence being connected runs contrary to much of our experience in a postmodern, industrialized society. But this line from the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us:

The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. (CCC #34)

We all are a part of something, and in something, which is much larger than ourselves.

To many moderns, love is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part. (Peter Kreeft)

We are not part of something, but some One.

Our Lady of Mercy, pray for us…

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
     Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
     From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
     If I lack’d anything.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
     Love said, You shall be he.
I, the unkind, the ungrateful? Ah my dear,
     I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
     Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
     Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
     My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
     So I did sit and eat.

— George Herbert, from The Temple (1633)

Some quotations from Crisis of Faith, Crisis of Love by Thomas Keating that have been lanterns of hope along the path through the valley…

The absence of the felt presence of The Lord is his normal means of increasing our faith and of getting us to the point of believing in the power of his word alone, without “signs and wonders,” that is to say, without the feeling of his presence or external props. [cf John 4:46-54]

(Fr. Keating assumes that one is trying to avoid sin. God knows one will not be successful in avoiding sin, but resistance to temptation should/must be there. Stubborn attachment to sins, by definition, can also cause an “absence of the felt presence of The Lord” for fairly obvious reasons.)

In reference to the story of the Canaanite woman begging for help in Matthew 15:21-28 (emphasis added below):

Who is this daughter who was so “sorely tempted by a demon?” It might not be too farfetched to consider the daughter as a symbol of what Paul calls, “the physical part of our being,” [2 Cor 4:16] which is truly tormented by a demon at this crisis in our lives when we go to God, and his former tenderness, sweetness, and whatever else we may have received, are turned to dust and ashes. The more we plead, the less we seem to be heard. The lower we crawl in the dust, the more he seems to suggest getting lower. It is the cry from a heart that is really serving God which Jesus seems to turn down here. Why? Because we are “unprofitable servants” and have no right to the “food of the children.” We have no true right to anything in order of grace. It is precisely by facing up to this reality that we pass from confidence in our own merits to faith in his mercy. As soon as she acknowledged that she had no right to food, she got not only a crumb, but the whole banquet. That is really the substance of the crisis of faith—and it’s resolution.

A few pages later (emphasis added):

Ask somebody whom God is trying to jockey into this kind of crisis, and he usually will say something like this: “I’m going backwards. God doesn’t love me anymore. He doesn’t listen to my prayers. He never gives me what I want. I can’t find him in books. Prayer is a mess, one distraction after another. Temptations of every kind abound.”

And yet underneath all that debris there is the same kind of perseverance and longing for contact with God which shows grace is secretly at work. What is actually being destroyed is our dependence on our own ways of going to God. Actually these much loved souls are being invited by Christ to the same kind of expansion of faith that the Canaanite woman experienced. Remember what the grand finale was. At a certain point, when her confidence reached the degree Jesus was waiting for, he acquiesced and said to her, “Woman, great is your faith. You can have anything you want!”

What we really want and what the Holy Spirit is inspiring us to long for in the crisis of faith is a confortation with the Word of God in or inmost being. It is contact with the divinity of Christ. It is to be brought inwardly face to face with the living God, who, faith assures us, dwells within us, and who, hope reassures us, will reward those who seek him with his presence.

O Father, I hope this is where I am. I do not know. I cannot see. I trust You. Lead me where You want me.