Where will I hide from your face

From St. Clement:

Where will I go, where will I hide from your face? If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go to the limits of the earth, your right hand is there; if I lie down in the deep, your spirit is there.

Usually I find myself attracted to spiritual imagery that leads us to a closer union with God but these words from the second to last paragraph have been running through my mind all day. They are, I believe, paraphrased from Psalm 139. Instead of being frustrated at the futility of trying to hide from the Lord, I am instead comforted by the fact that there is no where I could chose to go where I would not find him waiting for me. There is, therefore, no reason to resist his love for us and that we should always remember that we are the portion he has chosen for himself.

Every one of my days was decreed.

From Psalm 139:
Your eyes saw all my actions
they were all of them written in your book;
every one of my days was decreed
before one of them came into being.

And yet we still struggle to be in control and fail to consider God’s will for us. These words written several centuries before the time of Christ and I, like many others, still have not gotten the message that our days belong to the Lord not ourselves.

Psalm 12 - Protect of from this generation

From Psalm 12:


It is you, O Lord, who will take us in your care
and protect us forever from this generation.
See how the wicked prowl on every side,
while the worthless are prized highly by the sons of men.

It occurs to me that the difficulties we face in the present age are nothing new in human history. Our faith and our church are under attack both from without and within and they always have been. In our time, however, society has increasingly moved away from a culture of life. Instead personal convenience and the concept that actions should not have consequences are increasingly accepted as a reflection of an enlightened society. We reward those who achieve personal wealth and fame regardless of the moral center of the person. The concept of someone like Lady Gaga being so widely known and admired while those who give up themselves for the benefit of others go unnoticed is not something unique to our time but the advent of instant media causes us to be surrounded by it, willing or not. Every generation has challenges to overcome but regardless of the challenge the answer is always the same. It is the Lord who will protect us if we chose to remember we are His people and seek his protection.

We find no rest except in Him

I find it curious that since I have started the sharing process with you wonderful people that I frequently trip over a rock in one of the readings and I end up rolling the rock around for a while to understand why it tripped me. The rock this week comes from the second reading last Saturday. St. Thomas Aquinas who considers why it is there is no complete satisfaction of desire in this life. He quotes St. Augustine, “You (God) have made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart can find no rest until it rests in you.”


I have long wondered why we can’t achieve a lasting fulfillment. We can have periods of time, both long and short, where we are completely satisfied. Then one day – and often times for no apparent reason- we wake up to discover that our head has been screwed on crooked and we are back to square one. God created us with a built in fail safe device to keep us from getting complacent or comfortable. The restlessness we feel stirs us to action, it drives us search and question and that same restlessness keeps us focused on moving forward toward our more complete union with him after death.

The notion that we will not know rest until we rest in him is not a downer. Instead it reduces my fear of death because the promise of resting him after death is far more attractive to me than being complacent in ignorance in this world.

What did the 99 do?

Matthew 18:12-14

Jesus said to his disciples:I have often wondered about what 99 sheep did when the shepherd went looking for the one who was lost. I remembered the image of the Basque shepherds who used to work for my great grandfather on the sheep ranch my family owned. If the shepherd started to walk from one place to another, the sheep followed him wherever he went. I believe that the 99 who were not lost went with the Shepherd when he went to look for the one who was lost. I also believe we are the 99 and every time we give of ourselves in service of others in his name, we are helping the great shepherd rescue the one who is in most need of Him.

“What is your opinion? If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray?  And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it than over the ninety-nine that did not stray. In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.”

Never Despair of God's Mercy

From the Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 4, verse 74:
And never despair of God’s mercy.


When I am in a good place, God’s mercy seems obvious. It washes over me and carries me with it, seemingly without any effort by me. When I am not in a good place that same mercy that was as endless as the ocean becomes as empty as a frozen desert. That is the nature of our spiritual wanderings. Sometimes we are lost, sometimes we are found. The instruction to never despair is a reminder that mercy is always available and it will come if we pray for it. It seems that we never find our own way back to his mercy. It always requires a word from another to bring us back to where we know we need to be in order to be comforted.

My Grace is Sufficient

I have the past several weeks been pondering this verse from 2nd Corinthians 12:6


"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness."

I stumbled across the scripture reference in a second reading authored by St. Augustine. As we go through life puzzling how and in what manner our prayers are answered, this simple reference is such a powerful reminder that a prayer for grace will always be answered but prayers for results remain something that God will answer in his own way and we must always remain humble.