In an e-mail from Catherine today were these words:
“I was in Valencia for the last couple of weeks and last week I went down to Nord Beach in Gandia and enjoyed running on the beautiful beach there. It has been so good to be away from Madrid for awhile. All week I have been running along Nord Beach, yet today as I went the same route, I noticed that my path had changed. The tide had come in and the usual place of hard sand was now under water. I was complaining in my spirit how much I hated running along the loose sand when I heard Jesus say to me, “I have prepared a new path for you. Don’t look for the familiar way of doing things.” I offer this truth to you - God is going to do a new work in you. Do not look for what is familiar and known, but trust that He is at work and His work is good, not easy.”
What struck me about the words in the e-mail were the last six, “His work is good, not easy” as those are exactly the same words that Shirley Wanchena (the founder of Pacim In Terris retreat center) spoke to me after my three day and night silence retreat this past September. Verbatim, those six words! Now as they reverberate within my heart I am discerning the significance of it – I know in my being the words are true. It is the hearing of them again that is rattling my heart.
As I think about this “Journey thru the Past” that I am on, I am again thinking about something I read by Brennan Manning some time ago and it came back to me today and I searched through some old journals to find the reference as I knew that I had recorded it. This is what he wrote:
"Jesus perceived that the only way to help people experience life as a gracious gift, the only way to help them to prize themselves as grace and treasure, was to treat them as treasure and be gracious to them. I can be anointed, prayed over, sermonized to, dialogued with, and exposed to God’s unconditional love in books, tracts, and tapes, but this marvelous revelation will fall on ears that do not hear and eyes that do not see, unless some other human being refreshes the weariness of my defeated days. Barring prevenient grace, we humans simply will not accept our life and being as God’s gracious gift unless someone values us. We can only sense ourselves and our world valued and cherished by God when we feel valued and cherished by others."
Awhile back a friend told me me, “Just follow Jesus and quit wondering if what you are doing is right or wrong. It is time to live.” I now have to fully agree with my friend, that the beauty in living is in being fully alive and being with people that both cherish you and you cherish. You can waste a whole lifetime stuck in and consumed with regret, “shoulding on yourself” as my friend Gary quipped to me one afternoon and never experience what living is. Sister Mary Michael O’Shaughnessy made this her daily prayer, “Today I will not should on myself.”
Because as Bennan Manning explains we all have, “…unique, mysterious, and irreplaceable personality” and it is in our personalities that we have to be loved and to love – our personalities, the essence of who each of is as a person with the Imago Dei imprinted deep within us. This is what needs to be cherished in friends and community, when someone dear comes into your life for the first time or again into your life and, “…refreshes the weariness of my defeated days” this is beautiful as, “…we humans simply will not accept our life and being as God’s gracious gift unless someone values us. We can only sense ourselves and our world valued and cherished by God when we feel valued and cherished by others.”
Manning again, “Hope is the good news of transforming grace now. We are freed not only from the fear of death but from the fear of life; we are freed for a new life, a life that is trusting, hopeful and compassionate.” Really, what is there to fear, Jesus told each of us, “I am with you.”
Another aspect of all this is, to do it for yourself, as Frederick Buechner comments, “…love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, strengthen yourself” because after all what good will you be to anyone else if you are a wreck? In all this, “…His work is good, not easy” as St. Isaac of Syria wrote, “The way of God is a daily cross. No one has ascended into heaven through an easy life.”
All of life is like this and so that is why it is so necessary to have, “…friends that are as good as spring itself…” for in the midst of living there will be to some degree confusion as Daniel described our human condition, “…to us, o Lord, belongs confusion of face…” and as Bono explains, “Belief and confusion are not mutually exclusive. I think belief gives you a direction in the confusion. But you don’t see the full picture. That’s the point. That’s what faith is…” That is why those six words are so true, “…His work is good, not easy.”
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