03.28.08
old times, new times
I had lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in three years yesterday. We parted ways uncomfortably back then, because I was a poor listener and was angry with him and with myself. While I later apologized, it’s taken a while to get back to this place. Thank God for his patience and understanding.
Three years can be an eternity. This morning I am remembering a further location.
I remember reading Merton in my mid thirties, and seeing a glimpse of a far country. It was a place I desperately wanted to know. The lens was dim and deeply fogged. There was a freshness and faith and conviction in his words that seemed to come from a security unrelated to ideology, but from a deep knowing that I rarely touched. It involved his own ability to both affirm and deny: a comfort with both apophatic and kataphatic practice. It came from a natural humility and a confidence — con fides — that God chooses to make Himself known. And while he wouldn’t have used the term, he embraced a chastened rationality.
I know more about that place today, and I thank God for His faithfulness.
I’m prompted to this reflection today in part by Paul Fromont’s words. I’m also prompted by my daughter, who seems to move so naturally in this world that has taken me to many years and so much of the dusty road to reach.
Now, my daughter is in so many ways an average 20 year old, as a first child. But she doesn’t wrestle with distinctions between sacred and secular, or between social gospel and spiritual. The wisdom she carries in living these ways seems part of her DNA. It should be, because we spoke little of the distinction in her growing years, but simply practiced the truth. We practiced it imperfectly, but the example she saw became written into her own worldview, and her own lifestyle. It has led both to a different set of challenges and a more holistic outcome. As she moves forward, she will have to learn to articulate a foreign world (modernity and its lenses) that I knew — and struggled to unlearn — by nature. But it will be from a place of freedom, as a post-modern pilgrim, rather than a gnostic child of the Enlightenment.
