Something Greater.

What if we had been born and lived and died in a tomb?
What if we had never seen the day begin and grow and fade,
never seen a sunrise or a sunset or a rainbow,
never seen the snow fall,
or heard the rain beating on the roof?

And then one day,
out of a thousand days that one could not recognize as days,
a voice called out of the darkness, promising,
“There is more.
There is a greater thing beyond this unrelenting,
small, constricting world into which you have been born,
and in whose darkness you curl upon yourself
moment after unseeing moment,
as if there were nothing else.”

What if, indeed.

And then, what if you felt your hand being taken,
yourself being led,
led somewhere you knew not of,
your eyes growing accustomed to a growing light,
your feet set on a path—
a path, when you had never before felt the ground beneath them?

There is something greater here.

So much greater that your imagination could never have
brought it up out of the dark,
out of the stillness,
out of the nothingness of what had been.

Our lives are so small.
Our lives,
the lives to which we cling,
and the successes and satisfactions that flicker in the dark,
are rooms so small,
so inconsequential and unreal
that they disappear entirely in the light of what awaits beyond.

The trick is to believe.
To believe that it is there.

To live as if one’s longings were not bounded by the dark,
and one’s life a steady Paschal Candle,
burning up the darkness,
pushing out the walls.

To live in faith is to agree that our infinitesimal regrets and longings
are tombs and mines and endless nights
in comparison
with the life that beckons
from the stricken heart of him who waits for us
and takes our hands,

Him who lights the road,
who makes the road,
who is the road.

Sr. Miriam Pollard. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Sr. Miriam Pollard, OCSO, is a Sister of Santa Rita Abbey in Sonoita, Arizona.