I first found the reading “Patient Trust’ from Teilhard de Chardin at the end of a book on contemplative leadership by Ruth Haley Barton. (Its at the end of this note if you’re not familiar with it) Instantly I knew I needed to live into the truth that he wrote about. After a time, I put it aside, but it re-appeared about a year and half later when I was on a Centring Prayer retreat. I was in the midst of a major life discernment and again felt convicted that his words were for me. After that I shared it with the Contemplative Fire leadership team and our Board Chair kept bringing it to every meeting we had. For the last sixteen months we’ve read it again and again. On Friday I joined the Contemplative Fire leadership via Skype and we read it again at both of our meetings.

This time I felt us moving through the period of instability and some sense of a future emerging for the community. I also found through those group conversations that personally I was emerging from the darkness and instability. I am beginning to find my feet, to touch ground here. The team helped me see the invitations that I’m receiving as beginning to touch solid land again. I sit back amazed at how many invitations I’ve had in these three, full but short, months. I can see so many doors opening before me. Light coming through those doors. There is a new life for us here.

It doesn’t matter that our pictures aren’t hung, or that there are still piles of things on the floor, or that I keep moving things around or that the workmen just knocked down the stairs leading to the house and found rotten wood! The instability all around me is just the way it is but it doesn’t claim me as it had in the past. My feet are beginning to touch solid ground again. I’m grateful that I know Deep Joy and that I smile in the midst of our mess. It’s such a lovely feeling when I’m swimming in deep water and then feel the bottom with my toes. I trust in the slow work of God, gently drawing me to feel the solid bottom again.

I’m writing Advent Reflections for Contemplative Fire. If you don’t receive them, go to www.contemplativefire.ca or our Facebook page to find them. I think I will focus the next few weeks on Advent and re-appear after Christmas.

Please receive ‘Patient Trust’ as my Christmas gift to you! Enjoy. Let’s be kind to each other. Let’s trust in the slow work of God in our lives, and the lives of those we care about.

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability —

and that it may take a very long time…..

 

And so I think it is with you:

your ideas mature gradually – let them grow.

Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances

acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow.

 

Only God could say what this new spirit,

gradually forming within you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accepting the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

 

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Love and prayers

Anne

Mystic in Motion

Contemplative Fire Community Leader, Canada