Life of Faith, Power of Prayer

The life of faith, in truth, is -like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, a g-g-gas; it is a mind-blower. We humans tend to try to put everything, including God, and love and life, into manageable compartments, and we hide in them. We hide inside our frameworks, our structures, our plans, our narratives, our willful and our unintentional bigotries.

But God -who created a world of order- points cannons at those tidy compartments and goes ba-boom! And when we ask, repeatedly, “why did you do that, when I had it all so beautifully arranged,” God says, “it was blocking my love. My love couldn’t fit with all that stuff in the way.”

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger realized he was about to be elevated to the Chair of St. Peter, he is reported to have put his head in his hands and prayed, “Lord, don’t do this to me…” He had planned for a quiet retirement; a little house in Bavaria with ten thousand books, a cat, a piano and a word-processor. And then–ba-boom!–he was sent, like Peter, to where he would rather not go.

To not obey would have blocked God’s love.

Obedience, for all it is decried, is in fact, the Royal Highway by which His Majesty speeds along his love, and his glory. It is the Autobahn of the Spirit. But we don’t find it half as amusing as the German one with the fast cars.
— Me, last Lent

I write a lot and often forget what I have written. Found this by accident and thought it jibed well with this speech by Sarah Palin and this conversation on prayer, from In the Arena.