"The drama that unfolds in the intimacy of each one's heart. . ."

Feelings, again . . . I know! I remember clearly Fr. Carron saying emphatically, "I don't care how you feel!" Another dear friend this week also corrected me, but it is not as easy as flipping the off switch. That brick wall at the end of alley that my feelings lead me down seems to work. When I reach that dead end, I am tempted to follow feelings again, feelings of despair, of having let the Lord down, of total inadequacy, of guilt. But these feelings just reveal, yet again, my overestimation of myself, the semi-Pelagianism toward which I tend. These feelings also reveal something else. They reveal my need for and my dependence on Him. My need and my dependence together constitute my desire. In other words, in it is in and through my need that Christ comes to meet me. Of course, it takes reason to sort all this out, to sift through the rubble, or pick through the wasteland, of feeling. I was praying all through Morning Prayer to engage this reality through an encounter. As I picked up the La Thuile exercises, Friends, That is, Witnesses, and began reading Fr. Carron's Synthesis.

"Who are you Christ, who once more have had pity on our nothingness, have taken the initiative toward each one of us and become present with all your power among us?" This is how his synthesis begins. Then, the much needed, even desired, correction: "How impressed we would be if we didn't take everything for granted!" How impressed I would be if I didn't hold myself in such high regard, instead of acknowledging my nothingness, my need for Him, my dependence on Him! Following up are the words I really needed, "Only He, with His power, restarts the game; with His power He frees us from our idols, into which we necessarily, inexorably fall again, if His power were not to go on showing itself among us." At last He shows His gentleness, His mercy, that spring from the infinite depths of His Most Sacred Heart, the well-spring of Divine Mercy, from which He keeps the event "happening now because when faced with our evil, our mistakes, our distraction, 'all our defilement,' as the psalm says, He never tires of taking the initiative."

Jesus, I trust in you, I hope in You. May I never hope in vain! May I live this day in the awareness of this encounter, in deep gratitude.