Clarity

Am I comfortable with paradoxes?  Mystery?  Having things in life that are unknowable?  Not being able to understand all the reasons for why things happen?

The Apostle Paul had such a lock on the truth of the Gospel...but he also recognized that we've only been given so much.  Mystery, wonder, paradox and unanswered questions still float through our lives...a bit like a beautiful mist moving over the calm of an early morning lake.  

Of what we are able to see, Paul said,

for now we see through a glass, darkly

The other day my folks mentioned a passage they had heard quoted from Brennan Manning's book Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path To God.  I looked it up.

When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at the "house of the dying" in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how to spend the rest of his life.  On the first morning there he met mother Teresa.  She asked, "And what can I do for you?" Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. 

"What do you want me to pray for?" she asked.  He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: "Pray that I have clarity." 

She said firmly, "No, I will not do that."  When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are holding on to and must let go of."  When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God."

Trust the God of the mists.