My Sacred Story

“Faith is not expected to give complete satisfaction to the intellect. It leaves the intellect suspended in obscurity, without a light proper to its own mode of knowing. Yet it does not frustrate the intellect, or deny it, or destroy it. It pacifies it with a conviction which it knows it can accept quite rationally under the guidance of love. For the act of faith is an act in which the intellect is content to know God by loving Him and accepting His statements about Himself on His own terms.”  –Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 127-128

My sacred story –
          the one that calls my inner being into covenant with and through the Self-giving love of God,
          the one whose characters foretell and mirror my own spiritual pilgrimage,
          the one to whose longings, promises, and fulfillments I can shout a resounding “YES!” –

My sacred story is the story
          told in the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures,
          inflamed by the Holy Spirit in the early Christian faith community,
          and continually created in our world and our lives today.

If you have a different sacred story,
          one of love and spirit
          rather than of law and prescription,
          together we can find the same God speaking to us.

But if you share the words of my sacred story –
          words telling of the incarnation, sacrifice,
 and indwelling Presence of God –
          but share those words in terms of prescribed laws,
          then I will hear the Word of God less clearly in your telling
than in the telling of the one whose story-words are different,
          but through whose words the Word of God is clearly heard.

 

© 1999