Greetings!

It’s another relatively still Monday here in Kingston Jamaica. I am not sure how the complex tangle of thoughts and emotions trapped in my gut will be unraveled to make coherent sense to your eyes and mind, but I am going to try.

For so many, the past week has been pain-filled, to say the least. In addition to the deaths of dear and precious friends and acquaintances, there is the waiting with those who are ill, along with members of their families who have questions, the answers to which are often beyond my intellectual and even spiritual cognition level. This waiting can at times seem like a vacant movement, more towards depression than hope. Yes! We scoff at and are often silent on matters related to mental illness, thinking only certain people are thus afflicted, failing to admit that but for divine grace many of us would have already gone over, or are perilously close to, the edge.

I am sure you have also noticed even if you have been reticent in naming it, that there is a sense in which almost everyone and their neighbor has become a research fellow. So, on matters of health and wellness, religion and politics – whatever the subject or topic, there is no dearth of opinion from a wide cross-section of individuals, schooled within halls of information, access to which is gained via platforms of social media. What’s more, it seems that in tandem with this kind of schooling, opinion has usurped the place of and rendered fact based knowledge either archaic or worse, obsolete.

I am amazed at the number of lay people who spout information about Covid-19 for argument’s sake, with a level of arrogant certitude that would make a scientist, working for years on a particular experiment, begin to doubt the veracity of what has been proved many times over. We have arrived at that place in life’s evolving, where the longer, louder and more emphatic one speaks, the more plausible and hence truthful one’s content is perceived as being. Well, the jury is still out for me where that is concerned. There is still so much that is not known and while Google has become the new bestie of many, there remains that little matter of mystery that challenges us to accept the fact that beyond the finite human capacity to comprehend or even conjure up an image, are levels of knowing that reside in an infinite being. In other words, it is nigh unto impossible, whether via Google or social media, to extract from the Cloud of Unknowing, showers of information that are the prerogative of the divine!

There is a sense in which this current pandemic [for make no mistake, there will be others] added to which are the myriad challenges associated with health and wellness, in a holistic sense, is pointing toward the mystery that transcends human machinations. There will come a time – which is already here – when none of the answers we are so eager to proffer, from the storehouses of the various media, will be able to fill the gaps that only Almighty God can fill. Once again, it may be necessary to remind ourselves of St. Augustine’s famous words – “We were made for God and our souls will be restless until they rest in God.” It is from that soul-depth I believe, within the tangle of thoughts and emotions, if we are prepared to wrestle with them[cf. Genesis 32:22 – 32], that comprehension will begin to dawn, bringing forth the kind of enlightenment that enables us in the midst of sorrow, to know and experience joy.

Over the past week in devotion, I have been re-reading a prayer which is an adaptation of Hebrews 12:2 and the Prayer of St. Richard of Chichester, both of which I have known from ‘mi yeye deh aa mi nii’. Somehow however, in this adaptation, the use of certain words has put a whole new spin on the meaning of the scripture verse, so that I am now able to connect it with St. Richard’s prayer in a way that is enlightening. Here below is the prayer to which I refer, with the words that have impacted my mind and heart, in new and renewing ways highlighted.

‘Jesus, I fix my eyes on You, the author and perfecter of my story. Help me to know You more clearly, love You more dearly and follow You more nearly, each and every day. Amen’

The use of the word story rather than faith speaks to the evolving narrative of my life, without any judgment on what I do not or cannot know – what I sometimes find difficult to articulate let alone vocalize. The fact that the real writer and editor… perfecter of that story is Jesus, liberates me in my unknowing, to trust that it will have a good end; that because of divine grace, I can lift the cup of suffering, expecting that it will be filled with joy, poured out from the heart of the divine.

Allowing God in Christ to not only write but to edit and bring to perfection our individual stories, is to yield to the mystery without which it is impossible, as the song writer declared, to lay hold on life. It is in the process of yielding that we begin to realize that the kind of search we need to engage more than any other, is an interior one; the kind that helps us understand as Henri Nouwen pointed out, that because “every bit of life is touched by a bit of death”, it is truly in dying [to the many iterations of self, including human knowledge], that we will begin to experience life more abundant.

So, here’s my conclusion, there is so much that we do not and even more that we cannot know, at least now, when we’re only able to see through a glass, darkly. Let us not continue therefore, to frustrate ourselves, engaging the redundant exercise of arguing for the rightness of our and fallacy of another’s position, but rather accept the truth that along this journey that is life, for every cup of sorrow that we hold aloft, Almighty God is able to pour in joy. Then and only then will we be able in the midst of all that is pain-filled and puzzling to experience the blessing akin to Jacob’s, where even with dislocations, we can find strength and courage to hobble…to press along.

Until next week, continue to stay safe and well as you remain in His grip.

Grace+