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Mike, please take a look at the date you posted this note, it was
Valentine's Day! Maybe there's a clue here!
Saint John of the Cross said "Faith and Love are like two guides for
you (your soul), when you're blind, and they will guide you where you
can't imagine, until you reach God's hiding place. Faith, which is
the secret, represents the feet with which our soul goes to God and
Love is the the guide that will take you there."
Love! Where is your heart, what fills you with joy, love, enthusiasm
and peace? We aren't supposed to be "lukewarm" in our spirituality!
A thoroughly pure - and often fiercely burning - love is the only way
we will ever be able to make the "sacrifices" necessary (what seems
like sacrifice to others but isn't for us because of that consuming
love) to find our way back to God.
Your questions show that you are perceiving God on a more mature
level, one that few people reach nowadays. Mystical truth is
becoming a reality for you now. For example, how strange it is that
we love and honor Jesus and Mary as our best examples of perfection,
yet no one seems to want to "follow closely in their footsteps"! But
we should, if we are true Christians... and we will only be able to
make such tremendous steps if we are full of love, a love which
begins as personal and ends as mystical. Merton explains this
somewhat in your book "No Man is an Island" (on page 19-20 of the
Italian edition, near the end of the prologue) "Only when we see
ourselves in our true humanity, belonging to a race conceived as a
unique organism and one body can we begin to understand ... Solitude,
humility, negation of oneself, action, contemplation, the sacraments,
the monastic life, the family, war and peace - nothing of this has
any sense if it is not considered in function of the fundamental
reality of the Love of God that lives and acts in those who are
incorporated in His Christ".
You may want to consider what others think you should do, but
remember - YOUR key is in doing what YOU know in YOUR heart you
should do. Consider your heart always, before, during and after
every thought and action - your heart as individual AND as part of
the whole. (Your Valentine?!)
I'll conclude with my own story ... back in 1985 (when I was 25), on
the Eve of St. Agnes, I met a couple of drug addicts at a pub. That
night they were tossed in jail for breaking into doctors' offices and
stealing drugs (they would sell those drugs for cocaine). Everyone
told me to avoid them like the plague, but they needed help and I was
a "softie" ... I bought some of their belongings (stereo system,
etc.) to help them pay bail and helped one of them obtain his high
school diploma while in prison. My church-going friends and folks
were horrified by my actions, although they knew he came from a "good
family", they couldn't see why I would waste my time and possibly
taint my "reputation". But my inner faith told me I should help, and
these "losers" taught me a new love - rock climbing! One was
particularly talented, and connected me with a world champion athlete
that eventually led me to ... Thomas Merton! How? In 2001
repetitive dreams convinced me that I wanted to visit her (along with
her husband and two children), they were living in a very small town
(population 1800!) in southwest France ... I hadn't seen her since
our climbing days in 1986 although we had written several times. We
climbed mostly around Atlanta (her home town)... who would have
imagined back then that I would have married an Italian and ended up
near the Vatican and that she would have married a French man and
ended up in St. Antonin Noble Val - the town Merton lived in and
loved as a boy, where his father built their only home and wanted to raise him!
Incredible!
Meanwhile, that "loser/drug addict" had become wealthy, won world
titles
for paragliding and then became head of several paragliding
companies,
but that success landed him once again in drugs ... then he somehow
resurfaced and was living on a ranch in Idaho helping young people
survive drug/alcohol problems. In 2004 that "loser" helped save my
life by explaining to me his interpretation of the meaning of the
strange, esoteric
statue in Bellarmine University's quadrangle (erected on my birthday
in 1998, on the occasion of the first "Knight of Knights"
Celebration, in front of the Merton Center). Unfortunately, that
later cost him his life
http://www.redriverclimbing.com/viewtopic.php?
t=5778&highlight=greg+smith+memorial
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