Same here.Nonc Hilaire wrote:I'm losing the direction of your conversation here, but admit that Christianity is integral to my existence and will be be confounding at some point. Considering the subject, I pray that will enlighten rather than obfuscate.
It is hard to explain faith. I have never been able to do so very well.
Works are an articulation of one’s spirit and can certainly be a flowering of faith, but faith, for me, is a state of being, not a notion, a belief, a set of actions, or an understanding. Faith is a direction, an orientation, a turning to be present to God, silent and totally exposed. It is facing what we really are, what we are really meant to be, not what think, want, or believe ourselves to be. This is a very difficult challenge in our current age. We are so preoccupied with our words, possessions, images, passions, and narratives that we become so completely surrounded by the lights and sounds of our own making that we are unable to hear the word of God or to be illuminated by His Light over the swirling dust and din we habitually live in. So, when the time comes when we stand before God with our contrived selves, God, in the spirit of Matthew 7, will know us not, since we have become so identified with our idolatrous images and noises that we have become only empty fabrications that must live in a darkness we have failed to notice.
I have been thinking a lot about Robin Williams lately, who hung himself earlier this week. No one can say what he was experiencing, but somehow I have a real sense that I have been there. At that moment in my life many years ago, there appeared to me to be only total darkness. There was no way out through my usual plans, ideas, experiences, beliefs, etc. My usual contrivances would be quickly crushed under that great blackness. Yet for some reason I don’t understand to this day, I received the grace to accept my complete powerlessness, the absolute, total nature of my radical contingency, dependency, and vulnerability. The presence of God in my life at that time was the harshest experience of my life, but I would not be here without it.
I usually don’t talk about this with people, but sometimes I need to write about it. The sense of anonymity helps. I don’t expect people to understand, but I have been feeling an increasing sense of urgency that life is very short and it is tragic to waste it on triviality. So much is at stake for all of us whether we know it or not.