Church wide, Church deep.

A feeling grips me tonight, and it is one of complete gratitude. God has deigned to give me a tradition of depth, fire, and delight, stretching from St. Peter the Rock to the winsome smile and deep philosophy of John Paul the Great. I can revel in the colorful visions of St. Hildegard, or read Chesterton's scathing critiques of our "modern, but really regressively pagan" world. I can lose myself in Palestrina, or be moved to tears by the intensity of the still young and thriving MacMillan. I can revel in academic freedom, charity, science and medicine, knowing its source. As a musician, I can comfortably sit in Cecilia's charge. Now we wait for Benedict's new book on Christ, something I plan to eagerly devour over the summer. What a tradition!!! -- inexhaustible.

Tonight, exhausted from studying, I turn instead to relaxing in the words of Thomas Merton. Monk, mystic, author, poet, and active cross-faith and ecumenical crusader, Merton is one of the more fascinating figures of the Christian 20th-Century. And, as I'm discovering, he was able to be a darn good poet when he tried:

For, like a grain of fire
Smouldering in the heart of every living essence
God plants his undivided power ------
Buries his thoughts too vast for worlds
In seed and root and blade and flower,

Until, in the amazing light of April,
Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,
Creation finds the pressure of his everlasting secret
To terrible to bear.
(From The Sowing of Meaning.)

For my part, I'll be setting some of these lines to song. My whole being seems to be on edge, waiting for this tedious schoolwork to be done, and the real and important work to begin. This thursday evening, then, I will begin.

While I deeply respect my Christian and Jewish brothers and sisters, I simply could not imagine another way to go about the journey of faith. For years I searched high and low, examined every faith tradition I could find, and (in the words of C.S Lewis) put the greatest energy of my mind to determining what I believe.

In the end, I accept the Christ. Not a watered down tv-jaaaayzzus of a guy, not a nice guy, not a hippie or liberal (or conservative), but a God-man who exemplified every facet of behavior derived from the infinite, linking goodness and ferocity and every contradiction into a whole even a child could understand. This God-man set a rock, and upon it, 2000 years of rich thought and tradition has been built. I accept his bride, this great Church. No matter the mood or the problem, I can plunge into the ocean of our faith, letting the wisdom of generations illuminate the word and clear the grime from my vision.

Or, as Merton might write:

What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without visions.