Praise be to God, who gives beauty for
ashes : hope in the morning, strength for today.
You give me beauty for
ashes. You pull me close to Your heart. You have turned my mourning into
dancing. It’s what You do. It’s who You are. I am no longer what I used to be.
I am stronger because You live in me. It old has gone; the new has come. Brand
new day. Brand new life. I am softer because You live in me.
Dear God, form us into a peculiar
people who live differently because we have been transformed by You. May the
courage of the early Christians teach us to laugh at fear, to starve greed, and
to live with the winsome freedom of the lilies and the sparrows. Amen.
I
have certainly seen where the winsome freedom of the ancient hermits led them
in 400 B.C.: right up a steep rocky hillside to their very own cave, where
really only the sparrows fly and dry weeds cling.
And
once a week they gathered in a slightly larger cave, to praise God together and
break bread and drink wine. These hollows of decomposed granite are saturated
with prayers.
And
Sinan couldn’t really wrap his brain around the scorpions and snakes these guys
must have faced. In fact, for him, this was proof of God’s power and
intervention.
And
after the mass was lifted up, the hermits filled a bag with breads and
vegetables brought up from the village and returned to their solitude.
Certainly
a peculiar people. And yet many centuries years later another peculiar people
weighted down with the cares of a complex and dangerous world make a long hot
journey to those very caves to marvel. And to rest in the simplicity of
transformation.
As
I begin to pack up my Erbil bag, entering the bakery one last time for 1,000
dinars of bread and smiling good morning one last time to the woman sweeping
the street, fully aware of the importance of closure in a lesson, fully aware
of the power of the concluding sentence, my thoughts in spite of themselves
drift to the next bend in the road ahead, completely unknown.
Because
I think that in many ways it is where this peculiar pilgrimage will begin, sent
out two by two, but my companion is Jesus. And in solitude I will know His
lovingkindness more profoundly.
If you allow people to
praise me, I shall not worry. If you let them blame me, I shall worry even
less. If You send me work, I shall embrace it with joy. . . . If you send me
rest, I will rest in You. Only save me from myself. Save me from my own
private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move
for movement's sake, to unsettle everything that You have ordained. Let me rest
in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its
fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. That is what I live for.
Amen, amen. Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonah
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