Today’s readings: Click on today’s date at http://www.usccb.org/bible/
Who what when where … why
Friday, February 20, 2015
Friday of the First Week of Lent
Isaiah 58:8-9
Your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
Can I dream of such an apocalyptic day? Journaling in the spring of 1965, Thomas Merton wrote of solving problems, “It branches out. You have to keep clearing the branches. The more branches you cut back, the more branches grow. For one you cut, you get three more. On the end of each branch is a big question mark.”
Merton lives in his hermitage at Gethsemani in Kentucky. He treasures the darkness of two a.m. and the slow silent threads of coming dawn. “There is now in the large darkness a small room of radiance with psalms in it … In the formlessness of night and silence a word then pronounces itself: Mercy.
“Other words: Blood, Guile, Anger. Out there the hills in the dark lie southward. The way over the hills is blood, guile, dark, anger, death: Selma, Birmingham, Mississippi. Nearer than these, the atomic city, from which each day a freight care of fissionable material is brought to be laid carefully beside the gold in the underground vault that is at the heart of this nation.” (Fort Knox is just 37 miles by mostly country roads from the Abbey of Gethsemani, in the heart of the heart of the country.)
Merton knows we have not and will not ever create a heavenly homeland for ourselves, where our healing quickly appears, where we can call and God will say, “Here am I.” We are always turned upside down by soul sickness, infernal ego, drowned in blood, guile, anger. Doubts proliferate, and bombs fall killing the same children Jesus cherishes to his chest.
All we have is surrender. Giving up into mercy, and into the silence of predawn psalms. Once again (because we always screw it up the first time and the second) looking into the eyes of both my friend and adversary and saying to them both: I give.
Kyrie Eleison. Lord, have mercy. Christe Eleison. Christ, have mercy. Kyrie Eleison. Lord, have mercy.
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1334
