Labor Day

Labor day.

‘If you love me you will keep my commandments.’ For those who are convinced that true joy can only be found in God, in the Divine, in a Fire that transcends our human bounds, there can only be one way to live: to do what is right, even when, well, we do not always know what is right. To obey the inner fire when it comes, or our best moral sense and conscience, is the indispensable foundation of a spiritual life—a life in which we seek to know and taste the love and wonders of God.

We have faith because we choose to obey the One who demands faith. We seek God because it is his will. We yearn for him because he yearns for us. We walk in his way into loneliness, contempt, misunderstandings, betrayals and darkness. We bear the Cross and the crown of thorns and the whips and scourges of friends and foes visible and invisible. We walk, because we know that the resurrection follows the cross, and always has and always will.

We walk, for great dawns have flaming come after countless nights,. We walk, because our prize is Christ and his Fire.

And if the Lord calls us to loneliness, to places where no one can understand your actions, your thinking, your real aims...when one is excluded even from the communities that should rightly be home, the communities that ought to be our solace in our painful flight, when one is excluded from the Fire yet to come, yet destined in one’s heart and in luminous oceans above, when one believes things that no one else does, when even one’s own mind and heart can curl in contempt at thoughts and visions—then may your will be done, Lord.

Yet even in the darkest night we know we will not be down in this strange and winding and lonely path, if One has not willed it. And it is ultimately for the good of all. Though why this must be the way I do not know.

Home, home, home. So far, far away. The love we seek too, far away, yet growing, growing. Light, kindly Light, strange Light, new Light, that dawns anew and yet old on this earth? When will people understand?

One must walk on, burdened by earth and sin, till there is only Flame.

It is labor day.