Faith always looked like (to use my mother's expression) a beggar with a stick, and when it didn't I waited and expected that it would. Well, after just a few trouncings--and it doesn't take much--you stop seeing beggars and only see their sticks.
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Endless obstacles to faith, endless. Poverty, obedience, chastity, start with those. Start with poverty. In which to be authentically poor you give over your independence, your autonomy, your stations in this world, your security in others, your entire sense of self.
A mighty stick to carry. A whole tree. And JM would say (has said before with some levity) you simply exchange it for your cross. Whatever that means. Knowing what it means is usually more difficult than choosing to do it.
Good Friday, with my camera trailing behind the monks and the oblates in the fields behind the priory while they made the stations of the cross. The property is bigger than I thought, and I felt suddenly lost, panicked, out of place. I slid to the back of the line and fell in step with JT who was hanging behind to hear confessions in private. I said, "I don't believe in this, I want to leave here." "Good," he said with a single nod of his head and without skipping a beat, "now you have a true poverty to offer."
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