Saturday, April 12, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Full flood
I will make with you a covenant of peace;
it shall be an everlasting covenant with you,
and I will multiply you, and put my sanctuary among you forever.
My dwelling shall be with you;
I will be your God, and you shall be my people.
Even on my best days, I struggle to believe this promise. It’s a description of heaven, not of earth – not the earth I know from history or from personal experience. Earth is the place where hopes forsaken, dreams upended, plans crushed.
This is something Karl Rahner, a Jesuit who thought profoundly and expressed his thoughts well, felt too, when he said that “every life is an unfinished symphony.” If it’s a symphony, beautiful for situation, it is also unfinished. None of our lives can claim the joy of the whole earth.
Some of Ron Rolheiser’ best writing is about this puzzle in all our lives. Our personal puzzles are not transcended by our successes or even our dreams. Paul wrote that we are left with faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. Where does hope figure in, hope that shows me how to make peace with my own unfinished symphony?
We are fired into life over-charged with energy and desire, suffering from a perpetual disquiet. Life is never enough for us because what we want really is everything: to be everywhere, to know everything, to be known by everybody, to embrace and sleep with the universe itself and everyone and everything in it. Such is our desire, though never our situation.
I have often obscured this reality with blinders within which I see my own goodness, my success, my goodness, truth and beauty. But those blinders often fail, and then in an instant my self-image comes crashing down. I see the other side of the street, not so sunny after all. As my eyes open, my hope fails me. Life sucks, and then I die.
There comes a moment, whether we are conscious of it or not, when we say to ourselves: “I have all these dreams, all this energy, all this desire, this one and only life – and it finally comes down to this: this imperfect body, this individual person I’m married to, this particular family I’m part of, this small town, this less-than-fulfilling job, this house, this neighborhood, these friends, this little place in history. That’s it. That’s my life. I’m to have nothing more.”
What stares at us from this end of the tunnel is the crushing limit. Coming to peace with God, ourselves, our loved ones, the world, and our mortality has a lot to do with how we appropriate this moment in our lives.
So here I am, reaching out toward 76, knowing how much I fall short, fail, fall short, fail, with so much promise, so much. Mom thought I could be president. Didn’t your mom maybe think that too?
Ultimately why do we keep on – with our chins up? Because even as our insignificance and the brute facticity of our mortality try to stare us down, something deeper, underneath keeps directing our lives.
What is it?
Paul’s faith in faith, hope and love did not come from success as much as it came from suffering and failure. Paul knew that God spoke to Jeremiah at the beginning of a seventy-year exile, not the end:
I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.  I will be found by you. (Jeremiah 29)
When God speaks, people listen. Jeremiah listened. I listen. All of us can listen – what else is worth our time? And Fr. Ron gets at some of what happens next:
A deeper part of us has retained the dark memory of having once been given a loving promise by a power more real and more trustworthy than anything in this world. The soul remembers that it was once caressed and kissed, individually, by God. Nothing erases that.
In a famous speech to Parliament in 1940, Winston Churchill’s eloquent oratory inspired his listeners to compare what would come to be called their Battle of Britain to the Mississippi River in full flood: ”I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”
And so it is with us, with the destiny of our souls, knowing where we came from and where we’re going – on the one hand dust, on the other glory. In Rolheiser’ words,
Thus the soul knows that it means something, that it is known, that its private joys and heartaches are not insignificant, and that it is destined for an embrace, a glory, and a significance beyond the most grandiose of daydreams. Yes, the tiny rivulet of our lives will flow into that great ocean that we cannot yet see, but, deep down, we dimly sense that we came from there.
(Ezekiel 37, Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 18, John 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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