Embrace

“My Lord God,

I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust you always though

I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

This piece is by Thomas Merton. It is so strange that I am attracted to this. I am caught by it, not in a religious sense (whatever that means), but physically. It aims and hits my heart. Why?

My heart opens to God, and God to me. This desire spools out from my heart to God and from God to me. It is my most sacred spot and opens me to a universe of possibilities. It has nothing to do with achievement, or worldly success. You don’t have to “do” anything. It is the unspooling of my life on this earth. We all have this. It happens in time and in space and in eternity. I embrace it and it embraces me. Sounds like God to me.

Is this too silly? I want to live righteously. What does righteous mean?

The word “right” comes from the Old English riht, whose original meaning was “straight” — in other words, not bent or crooked. Like straight arrow, straight on or straight talker. Righteous means to strive to do the right thing. And what does God (god) represent to me? A path, a righteous path.

I am no Thomas Merton. I am irreligious, lazy thinking, not thoughtful, often, in my actions. I am noisy and impulsive. The arduous religious life will never be what I would choose. But holy living doesn’t mean hard and joyless, does it? If you say a path is righteous doesn’t make it true. All I can do is play out my realization of right.

I can dig in my garden, watch the birds and beasts, embrace people I meet. That is my devotion. I please you and desire to please you in loving the world. Is that enough?

I was raised in a tradition of guilt and dark images: the crucifixion, the agony of the saints, prostration before the altar.

But desire, even godly desire, means reaching out toward what one desires, reaching out in joy, not self-abnegation.

For God is a great ocean and the tides are the movement of all living things ; we come from and go to. It’s the to-ing and fro-ing, the flow that best describes the arc of existence.

Where the hell did this come from. Guess I’ve been imbibing the godwater.