Because Lent is near

Because Lent is near

I will retreat into the Wilderness

and Guests will share their stories here

The last blog written by Dan McDonald until following Easter Sunday

 

            I do not have a balanced soul.  I get sidetracked by desperate moods or preoccupied by latest whims.  Living alone probably magnifies these flaws.  So on occasion I must speak to my unbalanced and undisciplined ways.  I have been blogging for a little over one year.  I have followed the whims of the little feller in my head who says “we could write about this, this, that, and oh this here.  But now I know it is time to tell him, that he must be silent for a while.  It would be better if I listened to a different voice beckoning me and then when the time is right we will write.  But a voice beckons me to come into the wilderness, to be silent and to attend to the Rabbi I am to meet in the Wilderness.  I have been told that I must go to the mountain with him.  The Rabbi, who carries the wood, is beckoning me to make a part of the journey alongside him.  I am to be silent, to be like a child, to be as Isaac in this journey; for the wood the Rabbi carries is to be carried to a mountain where a sacrifice is to be made.  I am to walk, sit, kneel, and pray in silence until the appointed sacrifice on a dark Friday when the sun will shine not during the hour of sacrifice for the appointed lamb.

            I must put aside my pen and leave my keyboard behind, and blog no more.  I understood this without words.  I wondered if this meant that no blogs would appear for these forty days.  I heard no voice but it was as if I understood that it was time I was to treat my offer of a blog as if it were not really about me at all.  It could not be about me if I wished for a visitor to be granted a blessing for having visited the pages of a panhandling philosopher.  I felt hurt, but then it was if a burden was removed that I had carried far too long.  I thought of an icon of one known as John the Forerunner, and I prayed quietly "May I decrease that you may increase", may I be content in the Baptizer's prayer.

            I felt again though he spoke no words how God had blessed me through the lives of others, and intended me to learn from others and intended me to be in some moment a blessing for others.  I have been blessed by others, often the best thing to be seen in me is something written upon my soul by another who has imparted something from his life to mine.  I wish sometimes the good that one could see in me might be hidden for the better to have been able to be seen by him or her who taught it to me.  For so often the good they see in me is I think the better they could see in another whose life taught me.  Then I understood that while I traveled on my Lenten journey, I could ask those who taught me good to share the story of their better to those who come to my page for a small blessing. I began to think of people to ask who would share their story while I was away on my Lenten journey.  I am not sure how many of you might get my call.  Some of you from old and a few from new might get an email, a direct message, asking if you would share something of the story of something I have valued learning from you.  For I am sure that I would love to tell the story, but I am sure that you are the one to tell it better.  Please consider what I will ask of you.

            I want to complete this blog today with words I read expressed long ago by St. Bonaventure.  He said “God is the one whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”  Think about those words, “God is the one whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

I admit, as an ignorant Protestant, I don’t know his writings, but I know how these words have spoken to me and that they may be shared with you.  I know that God, infinite and beyond our comprehension so loved the world that he sent His Son into the world that He might bring us to God.  Because God’s center is everywhere, then if the love of God in the life of Jesus Christ has found you, then you are at the very center of God.  He has loved you as if you are the whole world, and he has loved me, and he has loved those for whom he came, and only those who would flee his presence and cry out for the rocks and mountains to fall upon them will not be there in his center, for he has placed each of us in the center in his only begotten son.  I know also that there is no circumference regarding God, no limiting boundary to his love shared with his people.  We fallible human beings draw circles beckoning one person to a special confidence and pushing a soul we do not favor to the fringes.  We know that sin abides in us, who would seek to do good and we draw circles, “O’ mighty God have mercy upon us.”  But with him there is no circumference and if you are his in Christ then you are in the center of his love and never on the fringes.  So I am sure now I can do this.  I can make a Lenten journey, and know that my guests will share a story and that God through our strengths and weaknesses, and they are both alike to him, will have each of you at the center of his love.