An haiku of hope:
Made is the promise:
all lost things are someday found,
if they want to be.
An haiku of hope:
Made is the promise:
all lost things are someday found,
if they want to be.
Part of me feels heavy with anticipation of Good Friday. The Passion always makes me hang my spiritual head low. All is His pain and suffering and loneliness.
Part of me feels light and giddy with anticipation for Easter. The Easter Vigil Mass is my favorite Mass of the whole year. The joy is hard to contain. I want to bust at the seams trying to hold it in until Saturday.
The dichotomy, the opposites, the friction, the paradox—the Paschal Mystery—death transforms into life, sorrow into joy, loss into victory. I want to sing the Good News with a loud Alle…! But not yet. 🙂
Heard this line in the movie, As Good As It Gets:
Waiting gives the devil time.
Waiting also gives God time.
To paraphrase Peter John Cameron, O.P. in “Lent and Reality”: Salvation is an escape from our own inability.
In our darkness, the incomparable capacity of our being will settle for nothing less than the embrace of the Infinite. Like nothing else, our helplessness moves us to cry out for that embrace in confidence and trust. The cry of forsakenness that Jesus emits from the cross is just this.
Dare to move from belief to trust.
Is God in Hell?
The modern explanation likes to say that Hell is the absence of God. But can such a place exist?
The very existence of reality is grounded in God. Being or existence itself is in and of God. God is existence. All is within God. In otherwords, our existence is not independent of God, but God is independent of our existence. If God stopped “thinking” of the world, it would no longer exist.
Maybe the question is asked in the wrong order. Is Hell within God?
Why would God allow a place within Himself to exist where no one would feel or know of His presence?
How does one who exists within God “feel” the absence of God? (Whether “feel” means to sense or to know or to experience.) Maybe the one has made the choice to “feel” the absence of God’s presence?
I have heard that there is no gate to Heaven, and the gate to Hell is locked from the inside.
What the self decides in time is ratified in eternity. (Peter Kreeft)
I choose you Father. I want to be with you. I never want to feel your absence. Not because I fear the punishment. I do. But rather, because I love you. Help me to love you more. Help me to love others more. Polish the mirror that I am so that I may reflect your love more perfectly.