A lit candle, a glass of wine, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata softly playing, feet up, head back, soul quieting. Is God here?
A house burnt to the ground, shattered glass and debris, daylight reality, feet like cement, head down, soul crying. Was God there?
Mary knows both. Simple joy and unbelievable horror.
Noticing God in both.
In a recent faith sharing group, she relates the latter experience of walking through nothing but rubble the day after her house was destroyed by fire. Nothing to retrieve. That is until she spots a tiny piece of cloth under her feet. Lifting the charred wood, there is her youngest son’s baptismal robe untouched. Pushing the debris further, his baptismal candle melted and bent, but the three ribbons his older siblings tied on it, unscathed. Nothing else survived the fire.
The recovery of these sacred symbols took greater significance pointing to this young son’s own survival of a rare childhood cancer several years earlier.
“Whenever life gets difficult, and I feel I am spiraling into despair, I remember that moment and I know now, as I did then, the Holy Spirit is always with me.”
Ordinary and extraordinary.
The definition of everyday redeeming love: God seen in the unseen.
The art of noticing.
– Fr. Joe Driscoll