Patient Trust
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Pierre Tielhard de Chardin SJ
Merton: from New Seeds of Contemplation
“What is serious to man is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God appears to us as “play” is perhaps what he himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts himself in the garden of his creation, and if we could let go of obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear this call and follow him in his mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see this migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our hearts; or when like the Japanese poet Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash – at such time as the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves as evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of the wedding feast. The more we persist in the misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes, the more we involve ourselves and sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves is on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.
