Wisdom 18:18-22: Seek Trust – Praise
Friday, December 13, 2024
A Favorite from January 6, 2010.
I have a friend who – whenever life gets a bit sticky for her or her children – is suddenly presented with hearts. Heart-shaped leaves, heart-shaped clouds, even heart-shaped patterns of toothpaste left in the bathroom sink. Today she told me that she was thinking: Who keeps leaving these for me? She believes that she has the answer, someone she knows through family photographs and family stories, someone whom she has not met in this life but who knows her in any case. She believes that it is her grandmother. So do I. Love knows no bounds.
In today’s Noontime we read about the love that God has for us, for his creation. This love is so great that land creatures survive in the sea; sea creatures walk on land. Fire in water maintains its strength; yet flames do not consume flesh. With these powerful images, we understand how strong God is; we understand how much God loves us.
The Meditation in MAGNIFICAT today is from Father John Tauler, a Dominican priest, a popular preacher and mystical theologian who died in 1361. This is what he has to say about God’s love.
Especially cherish firm trust in God’s love: if that weakens, your longing for God sinks away, and the hidden love is soon quenched within you . . . If one now questions whether or not he has true love, let him search deep in his soul and ever deeper, and light will be granted to him to know how he stands towards this degree of love. All the harm that can befall you is in this: you cannot fathom your inmost soul, or perhaps you will not. Once you enter there, God’s grace awaits you, admonishing you incessantly to keep up a courageous spirit about your standing with him. But many a one resists his inner voice and keeps on going so until he at last becomes unworthy of it and it ceases to be heard, and that forever. The cause of this misfortune is nothing else than self-trust. But if only one be humbly submissive to the divine guidance, it will finally lead him into such a divine union, that he shall enjoy in this life something of the bliss proper only to life eternal. May God grant that this shall happen to us all.
Our self-trust, rather than trust in God, is what often prohibits us from seeing the glory that is God each day. Miracles happen around us and to us constantly, yet we worry so, and fly through life at such a rapid pace that we may miss these glorious hearts being left for us along the way. We miss the times when breaches are bridged, when wounds are healed, when the dead rise . . . and so we do not praise God because we walk past the many ways in which he loves us each morning, each noon, each night.
For myself, I will make a special resolution to be on the look-out for the heart-shaped messages God is sending to me. And then I will pause to praise God. I will begin to cherish a firm trust in God’s love for me, I will search my soul even deeper, I will look for the ways in which I have been magnified and glorified by God . . . and I will look more carefully for that divine union in this life.
Cameron, Peter John. “Meditation of the Day.” MAGNIFICAT. 20.1 (2010). Print.
Images from: kids.nationalgeographic.com/wacky-weekend/article/hearts-in-nature#ww-hearts-nature-swans.jpg
The Noontimes 