PATIENT TRUST…

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I write this on Holy Saturday—a time when we pause and wait. My plan for this month’s blog entry had been to share a prayer that touches me and fits well with the Lenten season. As I write this morning, I also see how the prayer speaks to the pause and waiting of Holy Saturday.

As we prepare to celebrate Easter, we are again reminded that the crucifixion is not the end of the story or the final word.  Fall and winter always give way to spring and summer. In the Christian experience, suffering is never the end. God always has more.

Today I offer this quote to ponder—

“So, what is the message of this strange spring, this long-awaited Easter? It’s a message that is both old and new: Love is stronger than hate. Hope is stronger than despair. And nothing is impossible with God.”      Fr James Martin, S.J.

And, this prayer—

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 Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.