Reflections

Every evening, as my family returns home from work or school, we ask each other, “what did you do today?”  My kids often say, “not much.”  Ellen and I usually respond with a litany of meetings, coffees, and items checked off (or added to) the to-do list.  I am grateful we are busy, and the question “what did you do today?” may seem banal, but it also values the other, their experience, and their interactions with the world.  To paraphrase Louis Armstrong, when we ask “what did you do today?” we’re really saying, “I love you.”

 

One of my (and many others’) spiritual heroes is Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, writer, traveler, and Kentuckian.  You may have encountered his famous prayer, taken from his book Thoughts in Solitude,

 

"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 that 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 will I 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."

 

I often remember Merton’s honest words when I ask myself, “what did I do today?”  I may be able to point to a long list of accomplishments, and sometimes my only accomplishment is a nap.  Still, I often find myself pondering how I spend my time and how it fits into my calls to be a father, a husband, a disciple, a priest, and a citizen.  I pray the Lord sees I am trying to follow, trust, and know I am never alone.

 

That being said, I often wonder what I can do these days.  From the heat issues in the building, water issues in the city, my children growing up in a world so vastly different than the world I grew up in, and a nation mired in rage, I sometimes find myself entirely unqualified to do anything.  And so I pray, “my Lord God, what can I do.”

 

Today, the answer is prayer.  I pray for my family.  I pray for my parish.  I pray for the Church and her leaders.  I pray for our nation and her leaders, especially those who make me want to throw my television out the window.  I pray we give each other grace and remember that whoever the other might be is just as lost and overwhelmed as I am.

 

On the wall in my office hangs a framed copy of another Merton quote, from different book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.  Some refer to this moment as Merton’s "Mystic Revelation."  The spot where it occurred has been named “Merton Square.”  He wrote,

 

"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers … The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream … As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are … There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun … I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes.  If only they could all see themselves as they really are.  If only we could see each other that way all the time.  There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.”

 

That’s a long quote, I know, but it grounds me: the knowledge we all contain a spark, "of pure truth … which belongs entirely to God.”

 

I pray I, and we, and all our fellow Saints, hold fast to this truth as we navigate God's broken, anguished, and beautiful world.