The Truth & Light

“...We all of us waste our inheritance of grace, not because we willfully choose to go out and plunge into corruption like the prodigal son (though some of us do). Much of our habit of wasting grace comes from not knowing who we are in the eyes of God. We do not really believe what he tells us about who we are and who he is. Of course, we accept the theological abstractions, we acknowledge on some level the truth of what Jesus tells us, but it does not burn in our hearts. It remains semi-dormant in our heads, and whenever it comes to mind we perhaps think to ourselves, yes, that’s a wonderful truth and isn’t it great to have a good God like this. But it rarely if ever brings us to the point of throwing ourselves into the arms of God. We work hard to prevent ourselves becoming that weak—as weak as a child in desperate need of his father’s mercy. We become that weak whenever life brings us to moments of encounter with physical, emotional, or material failure in the ordinary and extraordinary trials of existence.

...Weakness was forcing us to see our root fear, the root fear of abandonment, the root fear of insufficiency, and the most horrifying fear of all—that maybe God wasn’t really looking after us, maybe he wasn’t what he said he was—a Father. I make bold to say that at the core of every heart this fear is present. Until we faced that fundamental doubt, the light of Christ could not heal it. Human nature builds a wall of protection around the dark little corners of fear inside us. We have all kinds of devices for this, money being the most obvious one. We can pad and buffer our life, distract and entertain ourselves very successfully in this society, filling an entire lifetime with it.
...But all such defenses are only delaying mechanisms.”
~Michael O’Brien