“We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God
in this life, and that is why we are travelling in darkness. But we already
possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are
dwelling in the light. But oh! How far
have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
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Sometimes I feel like I spend my life
living “in between”
Between two worlds?
Between “heaven” and “hell”?
Between ignorance and understanding?
Between the beginning and the end?
There is always this tension
between what I know to be true
and what I experience as true
between promise
and actuality
I am both/and
I am a child of heaven and have feet mired in the ooze
I am loved by the Sacred, and yet often feel so
unlovable
God dwells in me, and yet God often feels so
distant
In grace I have already “arrived”
And yet the destination seems so far away
Perhaps the real spiritual task
for me, for all of us,
Is to realize, become awake to that
our connection to God, or rather God’s connection
to us
is always changing, evolving
We move from grace to grace, glory to glory
Stumbling all the way
The key to growth, to maturation,
to growing up into Jesus,
is not “trying harder.”
It is (as Isaiah would put it),
“waiting”
What does it mean to “wait upon the Lord”?
I think it means to hope, to trust, to listen, to
hear
to reach up, in the midst of our stumbling journey
and find that the hand we sought
childlike
to lead us on
was there, all along
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