Ordinary Time – Luke 11:5-13
“Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.” This was the biblical verse I was given when I was 14, when I was confirmed a Missouri Synod Lutheran in Spokane.
And in a way it’s problematic for me now because it doesn’t at first seem to account for what I think is a major fact of the spiritual life, and that’s desolation. We seek and don’t seem to find anything sometimes, for days and weeks and months. We knock and the door stays closed, or seems to. All we have is emptiness or blankness or loneliness, or we’re bored, or the usual gossip and bureaucracy keeps going on inside us and we just don’t want to keep knowing that.
Maybe I’m concerned with this because it happens so much in my own prayer life and because I worry that when it happens to others it will discourage them and cause them to leave the faith.
But I think a door is always opened, whether we know it or not. It’s just not the door we thought would be opened. We do get a response, just not the response we bargained for, and sometimes what we get, what the gift is, is desolation.
“Everything is the direct effect of Our Father’s love,” St. Theresa of Lisieux tells us—“difficulties, contradictions, humiliations, all the soul’s miseries, her burdens, her needs . . . . everything, because through them she learns humility, she realizes her weakness. Everything is grace, everything is God’s gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events—to the heart that loves, all is well.”
This is what I understand a little better now than I did when I was 14.
We ask for the big and we get the small. We ask for the tangible and we get the intangible. We ask for the permanent and we get the temporary. But all praise for the small and the intangible and the temporary because this is our life and it’s all beautiful and fitting and right.
And besides, often we do get the gift of joy, too. We do receive the great graces of peace and freedom and ease and richness, in the moment, in our work, in our families. It’s not so much asking as seeing, as looking, as being attentive to the world, and patient, watchful, for the grace is always coming, always pouring down, and it’s a matter too of asking for the right things, of knocking on the right door: not asking to win or to look good or to be rich or powerful but asking to do the will of God and asking to be in the moment and asking to be open and available to the small things and the fleeting moments.
We ask for the big and we get the small. We ask for the tangible and we get the intangible. We ask for the permanent and we get the temporary. But all praise for the small and the intangible and the temporary because this is our life and it’s all beautiful and fitting and right.
A glimpse: a student the other day came into class and smiled and asked me how things we were going, and then he gave me a fist bump. He reached out and bumped my hand. Just for fun. Out of youthful exuberance, I think. A small gesture. A lovely thing. I hadn’t even asked for it, but it was given to me. It wasn’t on my lesson plan for that day. It wasn’t what the class was about. But it was. It was.
All praise for the Lord our God.