"Rest..........................."

My return to school has, as usual, reduced the frequency of how often this space reflects my thoughts, putting them down in print, for me, not just some Facebook post announcing my location and current activity. In truth, I’ve attempted at least two different paths this past week only to discard the subject entertained, all sense that it might be of interest to anyone else having dissolved along the way. Truth, it seems to me, anyway, is a rather “middle-of-the-road” item, a line so thin it’s nearly invisible, the slightest step to either side taking you a degree off center. God, only, is absolute. The best any of us achieve, in any attempt to pursue Him, is a stagger. Even so, I go. Dante, the author of “Inferno”, wrote of coming to himself “in a dark wood where the direct way was lost”, a fear “scarcely less bitter than death” gripping him at some point in his life and he having need to tell the whole story, the good and the bad, if he was to tell it at all. He was Italian, Catholic, I assume, and his faith a matter not known to me. This old man lost “fear” when Christ stepped inside my existence, but the idea of yet questioning one’s position, of yet questioning the journey in so far as your own humanity, the Church at large, and the world around you, is a daily matter. I walk with caution, trusting in the anchor-line provided. “Self”, however, too often has proven unreliable. That squirrel recently encountered crossing four lanes of expressway in panic yet remains mentally framed, an image of him having conquered that stretch, but now with his back to the wall, hands glued to that divider and trying to determine what to do next for some reason amusing to me. The tale, no doubt, will go with me on both of our next ministry outreach visits. Who among us hasn’t, at one time or another, known such predicament? “Grace”, though, is stuck in my brain, another word for the Holy Ghost, as far as I’m concerned, its Greek New Testament roots translated in the rear of my Bible as “the divine influence upon the heart and its reflection in the life” and its reality, for me, a point of encounter, a promise given if connection is maintained. That “hook in my belly” holds, having proved itself to me again and again. It’s not taken for granted, this space but one form of prayer closet where the details of the moment are examined……