Fire and Fog.

It happened something like this . . .
I was driving across a bridge over the Mississippi during a razor-slashing Midwest rain. Alone, I could see nothing but a spray of blinding white and goose gray, accompanied by thunder and the sound of a wet deluge smashing on glass. But I was so (unfathomably) calm, even giddy with grace. A sacred meeting tent? I was not sure, but something like peace was very close. I chanced to follow the red taillights of a fellow traveler until we got to the other side safely.

I never expected to pick up God as a mysterious hitchhiker that miserable afternoon, still less to receive consolation in a terrifying storm. But the Book of Exodus reminds us there is a strange alchemy of both mystery and intimacy enveloped in Moses’ meeting with God. Moses had had a similar experience earlier, before the Burning Bush on Mount Horeb. What will come to be called the Cloud of Unknowing in the mystical tradition tells us something similar about our relationship with the Almighty: meeting God in prayer does not occur on our terms but the Lord’s. Fire and fog: that is the place where the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is hidden in the covenant of love.

Perhaps today we might surrender to the unknown unfolding before us, as the Sower scatters the seeds of the Word. There are reasons aplenty for our self-righteous judgments, speculations, uninformed opinions, or weeding out other people’s faults and sins. But let’s leave that sifting to the apocalypse of the Kingdom that is to come and to the One who will bring its harvest at long last.

Fr. Guerric DeBona. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Fr. Guerric DeBona, OSB, is novice/junior master at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana and professor of homiletics in the Seminary and School of Theology.