Exhaling

You are with us always, and the beautiful thing that we sometimes miss in all our busy-ness is that Your Presence on earth has all the practicality our nature requires. We serve You by attending to the needs of those around us, and this orientation towards others keeps us sane and happy, and helps others to be sane and happy. And whole, ultimately.

And wholeness makes us interiorly free; free enough to open ourselves fully to Your love, to unwrap our hearts and offer them to You; free enough, open enough, to utter our own FIAT again and again.

We must be freed of ourselves and of every attachment in order to utter the FIAT needed to bear You into the world in the way YOU choose, no matter how improbable or unbecoming it seems to us. After all, what is more improbable or unbecoming than God as a laborer, a homeless rabbi? What is more unbelievable than the Son of God setting aside His glory or setting aside His garment to wash His disciples’ feet as a servant, so that they would be ready to share a meal? What is more scandalous than God as a convicted criminal brutally executed?

To our minds in seems that even more improbable than all this is to find Christ in the demanding spouse, the intrusion into our prayer time, the person who must be forgiven 70×7 times – God as one who must be endured, God as interruption, God as one who asks for reconciliation. Yet You are there.

You are just as present (sometimes more so) in the pain and burden of life as You are in the joy and wholehearted prayer we experience; as much in the perplexity and failure as in the clarity and success.

Until we see that the Incarnation means that You have reconciled the world and God, that You are the Point where God and man, Absolute Meaning and the cosmic reality, have become one, we will have a divided vision. Until we know the miracle that is the Word-made-flesh, we cannot see God and the world at the same time. We have to know that You are most present in our daily realities, not away somewhere in the realm of idea, or in some metaphysical place we cannot reach in this life, in order to embrace life in its quintessence and live it fully in You, with You, for You.

We have to know that You are the Life in every life, the Love in every heart, the giver of every true gift, the strength of every thing we lean on, the light in certain eyes to which we are drawn, the warmth in every welcome, the foundation of every true thing, in order to live in gratitude and see with singular vision the one reality that is You.

You are all. We exist for You. To You be the glory, though for now it is hidden in You.