Hermitage Note: Faith and Forgiveness

We are settling into our new surroundings quite nicely. I think it helps to realize and accept just how uncertain life can be. It also helps to realize that we are only passing through life as we know it in the physical realm.

Our reading from Hebrews today emphasizes that we are to keep looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and maker is God, our eternal home that we receive by faith and enter into by faith. It definitely helps to maintain a we are just passing through mentality.

Yet, it is so easy to develop attachments: attachments to people, attachments to things, attachments to places. Why? There is something designed within the fabric of our created being that yearns for a sense of belonging. This yearning is one aspect of the void created within us when our first parents … Adam and Eve … transgressed against God’s word to them. In their violation, in their sin, they lost their place. They lost their peace.

Their interior peace was replaced with a sense of yearning for what they had lost. The evidence of their loss and personal corruption was immediately communicated into the lives of their immediate children where we read the sad story of one of their sons killing another of their sons out of jealousy.

We, their offspring many generations hence, are still carrying on their sense of yearning for what they lost. It is easy, rather than intently maintaining an intentional focus on what can be seen only through eyes of faith, to focus on material things that can be seen with physical eyes. The truth of the matter is that absolutely nothing that can be seen with physical eyes, or experienced with any of the physical senses, will ever satisfy the deep yearning within our souls.

All these things capable of experience by the physical senses will always serve as bait for our human lusts. The Apostle John tells us explicitly in his epistle to love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.[1]

How capable we are, how skilled we can become, in wounding others in our yearning to satisfy our human ambitions and lusts. How capable others are, how skilled others can become, in wounding us in their yearning to satisfy their human ambitions and lusts.

I am only now beginning to realize how deeply wounded I am by the actions and activities that precipitated our being where we are. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, we are taught to pray by Christ. I forgive. I choose to forgive. My own carnality wants to reject this action … this choice. I must, however, forgive the few transgressions committed against me if I expect God to forgive the many transgressions that I have committed against him. Not only is my eternal welfare at stake. My own interior peace here in the here and now of daily life is at stake. I choose to forgive. Daily, sometimes multiple times daily, as Satan tries to use this to capture and hold me in his diabolical snare.

My choice to forgive does not remove the ugliness. It can never erase the memories. It can never erase the words or blot out the images embedded in my memory. The scars remain. The scars are painful. They still bleed. They still hurt. I do not conjure them. They come around on their own. And, with the pains they bring, comes the voice of Christ within my soul inviting me to join him on the Cross as he prays, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

How long will we be here? How long will we make this little old house by the short-line railroad track our hermitage-home?

We honestly do not know.

What we do know is that we are comfortable here … in this little cottage of a house … in this peaceful little community surrounded by peaceful fields and forests … six miles from the nearest Dollar Store and gas station … 14 miles to the nearest town where we attend Mass and purchase our necessaries.

What we do know is that we are again, one or the other of us, spontaneously saying the words … I love our life.

What we do know is that trying to come up with an answer to the question of “how long” is not a major concern for us. It is enough for us to simply focus on just being … who we are … where we are … enjoying and cultivating the healing presence and peace of Christ in our lives. He knows what we have need of and will, just like this little house, provide what we have need of when we have need of it.

[1] 1 John 2:15-17