Alone: The Beauty and the Pain

November 30
When God Breaks In

We are plunged into mystery – what Abraham Heschel called “radical amazement.” Hushed and trembling, we are creatures in the presence of ineffable Mystery above all creatures and beyond all telling.
The moment of truth has arrived. We are alone with the Alone. The revelation of God’s tender feelings for us is not mere dry knowledge. For too long and too often along my journey, I have sought shelter in hand-clapping liturgies and cerebral Scripture studies. I have received knowledge without appreciation, facts without enthusiasm. Yet, when the scholarly investigations were over, I was struck by the insignificance of it all. It just didn’t seem to matter.
But when the night is bad and my nerves are shattered and Infinity speaks, when God Almighty shares through his Son the depth of his feelings for me, when his love flashes into my soul and when I am overtaken by Mystery, it is kairos—the decisive inbreak of God in this saving moment of my personal history. No one can speak for me. Alone, I face a momentous decision. Shivering in the rags of my fifty-nine years, either I escape into skepticism and intellectualism or with radical amazement I surrender in faith to the truth of my belovedness.

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’”

Matthew 25:21

Brennan Manning
Reflections for Ragamuffins
Daily Devotions
Page 335


I'm not sending this because I read this everyday and I am a super "ragamuffin christian" because I have Brennan Mannings’ Daily devotional...but I'm sending it because I happened upon it yesterday and was struck by the simple profundity of it. Especially for this season of my life, and as I have been finding out from my friends, the season that many of us are in right now. The season of learning to embrace the dark ominous "alone". I am afraid of it, but then there is this awkward feeling of knowing that I should be okay with being alone, and I mean ALONE, and then this other reaction to it that seems to slam into me, and I have to run. So, when someone asks me how I am doing lately, I have been answering, "I'm learning to embrace loneliness", because I have no other way to put it. And I feel that for me, this lesson is too important to glaze over and rush out of. And proudly I see many of you doing the same thing with this question of "drinking the cup of aloneness". [side note to all of my friends who would add to this, "that does not discount the central importance of community and intense accountability in our day to day lives"] As we all know, we can be in a room full of people we love and who love us, and still feel profoundly alone. Anyway, I hope that you haven't lost all interest in reading what I was really sending this email out for in the first place.
Reflections of Ragamuffins...Brennan Manning...get it. Read Ragamuffin Gospel if you haven't yet, and if you have, reread it.
I love you guys. Thanks for listening, or reading I suppose.
And let me just say that I am glad to be your friend in this season of our lives. I'm thankful for the variety and quality of the people that God has woven into my life. You are amazing, you are the Beloved. Pretty much, you just rock my face off.
ajw