“Nowadays I always feel transported into Napoleonic times, and I can imagine in what tension people lived then everywhere in Europe. I wonder: will we live to see the events of our days become “history”? I have a great desire to see all this sometime in the light of eternity. For one realizes ever more clearly how blind we are toward everything. One marvels at how mistakenly one viewed a lot of things before, and yet the very next moment one commits the blunder again of forming an opinion without having the necessary basis for it.”
Edith Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters
Thanks to participating in a class through the Center for Action and Contemplation, over the last several weeks, I have gotten back into praying the Liturgy of the Hours. However, admittedly, it didn’t take long spending time with the four-volume set from my days as a Roman Catholic priest to become disenchanted by the embedded patriarchy. Fortunately, I could switch over The People’s Companion to the Breviary — an inclusive language version of the Liturgy of the Hours.
One of the things that I love about this version is that, along with scriptural readings, The People’s Companion also includes readings from other inspired sources, such as this reading from Edith Stein.
I was stunned as I thought that this could have been written today, finding myself as I did identifying with the desire to see our current situation in the light of all of creation. Not only that but also the wondering if we, “will live to see the events of our days become “history”.
And yet, somehow, this is not cause for despair. It is not cause to be dispirited or to lose hope. If anything, it fills me with awe and wonder — that giving birth to a new age in the history of humanity should be entrusted to those of us who find ourselves alive at this moment.
What helps you to gain perspective? How is the Divine revealing himself/herself/itself to you today in such a way that you are drawn into love, into awe and wonder?
These days can be challenging. These days can be exhausting. And the challenge of these days is the task that we are all invited to take up — tilling the soil of creation for what is to come. May God give us strength and courage. May God have mercy on us all.