Daily Reading for February 8
The perennial question, centuries old and ever new, harries us: What is the spiritual life? How do we develop it? Is it real? Is it possible? Is it even desirable? Isn’t earth about earth and heaven time enough for heaven? The questions plague us in the deepest parts of ourselves, to the blackest recesses of our souls. “We live most of our life,” Wendy Miller wrote, “oblivious to our true identity as persons created and provided for by God.” The starkness of the statement catapults us into another dimension of religion entirely. To know our true identity—to really know down deep where we came from, to whom we belong, out of whose life we live—is to know that the God who made us is with us still. God is the eternal memory, the inseparable presence, the unending energy that beats within us yet, inchoate but clear. . . .
Once we empty ourselves of our certainties, we open ourselves to the mystery. We expose ourselves to the God in whom “we live and move and have our being.” We bare ourselves to the possibility that God is seeking us in places and people and things we thought were outside the pale of the God of our spiritual childhood. Then life changes color, changes tone, changes purpose. We begin to live more fully, not just in touch with earth, but with the eternal sound of the universe as well.
From Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir by Joan D. Chittister, OSB (Sheed & Ward, 2004).