On a Pilgrimage

Praying means, above all, to be accepting toward God who is always new, always different.  For God is a deeply moving God whose heart is greater than ours.  The open acceptance of prayer in the face of an ever-new God makes us free.  In prayer, we are constantly on the way, on a pilgrimage.  On our way, we meet more and more people who show us something about the God whom we seek.  We will never know for sure if we have reached God.  But we do know that God will always be new and that there is no reason to fear.

-With Open Hands

As I was struggling with prayer, trying to find time for it amidst the busyness of life on the road and demands upon my time and energies, I felt more and more that I did not even know what prayer was.  Then, like a light from the heavens, came a little book specifically on prayer.

The quotation above comes from that book, which was a gathering of various quotations from Henri Nouwen on prayer.  Always his words speak so deeply to my heart, reflecting the truth like a prism bending light into the depths of my being.  He is quickly becoming a steady spiritual guide for my earthly pilgrimage.

In that quotation, the words that strike my heart most deeply are these: We will never know for sure if we have reached God.  What a powerful and almost chilling statement.  Must we truly let go even of certain knowledge of reaching God?  Now that is abandonment indeed.

Yet that is often what troubles me: that I cannot know what is God and what myself, or what even may be the devil masquerading as an angel of light.  How can I go toward Someone when I do not even know I am headed in the right direction?  It feels too much like risking opening my heart to a stranger or merely to a phantasm of my own creation.  Either I must build up some comfortable idea of this God I worship or else find Him a perfect stranger, like Psyche who had never seen even the face of Cupid.

If we, like she, prompted by her sisters, try to see our Lord, to force Him to conform to our own will, perhaps we will find that He too vanishes in the darkness.  Perhaps instead we must remain in the darkness, with no candle, receiving His love and giving ourselves wholly even when He seems strange and unknowable.