"Religion has not tended to create seekers or searchers, has not tended to create honest humble people who trust that God is always beyond them. We aren't focused on the great mystery. Religion has, rather, tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy, glib answers. That's why so much of the West is undertsandably abandoning religion. People know the great mustery cannot be that simple and facile. If the great mystery is indeed the Great Mystery, it will lead us into paradox, into darkness, into journeys that never cease....That is what prayer is about." - from Everything Belongs, by Richard Rohr
I'm just sitting here today pondering the Great Mystery and the providence of God...or is it just coincidence?
Does it seem strange that I almost died last summer, have spent 7 months healing before I go back to work and am able to go back to work doing the thing that I loved most...teaching...without huge financial loss? Is it strange that there was a philosophy position already available on the campus where I first began my TCC teaching career and that they really wanted me back there to fill it? And now I have the same office on that campus that I had 15 years ago when I left to help open Southeast Campus? Is this coincidence or part of the Great Mystery? I'd like to believe it's the hand of God in my life working the evil that befell me into a good for God's purpose. There are no certainties here...just a hope and belief that God DOES work in our individual lives. This is a central part of the Great Mystery if it is true! It appears that the journey is a dangerous one...
"Do you believe that everything is part of a plan, a design, an intervention of God in our affairs? I do. And I am convinced that God's love can transform the darkness of a disaster or the irrationality of an earthquake into an event that can influence, or even completely change, our lives....I came upon this passage in Augustine: 'God can permit evil only in so far as he is capable of transforming it into a good.'"
-from Sought and I Found, by Carlo Caretto
My prayer:
"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 that 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."
-from Thoughts in Solitude, by Thomas Merton
