Driving home today from school I noticed how different the mere fact I was driving home at night was. It hit me that I was in a city completely different than one I had known for most of my life and that coming "home" to the apartment no one would really be there expecting me (my brother, my apartment-mate, tends to be a busy guy). It was odd, odd to think so relatively quickly I had gone from walking to my high school, of having my parents around every day, of cooking dinner for the family, of Cross-Country meets, of a greater accountability and sense of responsibility, of greater "strings"/attachments, a time of a fairly good amount of structure.
Driving home, and perhaps it was those bright stop lights and some traffic on the way, reminded me ever more of this pilgrimage. I had no idea how this young girl, scared to death of change, was now coming home, just a dark apartment waiting for her (and maybe some ready-to make rice). It felt extremely out of place from what had been before, of what had been always, and ever more lonely and independent than that I would have ever planned or expected.
"God approaches our minds by receding from them. We can never fully know Him if we think of Him as an object of capture, to be fenced in by the enclosure of our own ideas. We know Him better after our minds have let Him go.
The Lord travels in all directions at once. The Lord arrives from all directions at once. Wherever we are, we find that He has just departed. Wherever we go, we discover that He has just arrived before us.
Our rest can be neither in the beginning of this pursuit, nor in the pursuit itself, nor in its apparent end. For the true end, which is Heaven, is an end without end. It is a totally new dimension, in which we come to rest in the secret that He must arrive at the moment of His departure; His arrival is at every moment and His departure is not fixed in time."
-Thomas Merton No Man is an Island
Peace of Christ,
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