Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Random Thoughts

One of the things an understanding of God's will produces is the realization that, in any situation, the only dangerous element is oneself.

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"O Lord Jesus Christ, do what you must to me in order to make me a saint. Slash, destroy, cut, burn, uproot, imprison, hide, and terrify me. Take anything from me. My mind, my life, my eyesight, and the things too frightening for me to think of offering you. Put anything on me. Illness, paralysis, disfigurement, and the things too frightening for me to think of accepting. Thwart my ambitions, bring my plans and hopes to nothing, impoverish me in every way, if my plans, hopes, and riches would lead me away from You. Take away my books, make me unable to read, make me utterly stupid, if that would let me please You. Give my sins their fullest, most shameful, most public consequences if that is what must be to make me stop offending You. Make me a figure of deserved disgust and mockery among all men, if thereby I might be hailed by Your good angels. Grant me a mediocre, ordinary, and quotidian life, if any other life would distract me from You. Make me realize that my offering is ordinary, a plain and unexceptional duty called forth by what You endured to enable me to make it. Make me desire You above everything, to excel myself in doing Your will for me and those You have entrusted to my acquaintance. Make me love You with every aspect and fiber of my being -- not in spite of what You must do to me, but because of it. Do anything, please do anything to me to make me Your own. Even to granting my entreaties more seriousness, more foreknowledge, more honesty than I could ever bring to them."

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