“One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God’s grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can’t grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of the soul.”― Michelle Blake
We live in a time of doubt. In a world where ‘seeing is believing’ though we go through our days believing mostly in what can’t be picked up, weighed or stored away. We believe in justice, love, compassion. Have you tried to weigh those realities? We believe that others are aware and see us, understand us, yet their awareness cannot be seen but only experienced. We have to ‘trust’ in their reality and the deeper that trust and the less fear there is, the more profound our human experiences of the ‘other’ is and grows and takes deep root in our souls. Something else that can’t be seen poked or owned actually is our deepest selves. For our very selves is a gift from what we call God.
That “other” is our fellow men and woman as well as the “Other” who has come in the flesh. We await the coming of Christ, yet he has already arrived. We have faith, yet we have to also accept this gift, to believe in the love revealed in Jesus Christ. This takes trust and the less trust we have, the more poverty stricken our faith, or we will have none at all. Grace calls us to become children, true children, fearless in the face of fear, to love in a loveless environment, to have faith when all seems dark. Being childlike is to be lead by the fierce of God’s love through the fire and trails of life.
Br. Mark Dohle, OCSO
Holy Spirit Monastery
