My Journey is Not Yet Complete

“... I will not hide from this mysterious being who is myself ... I have only two options: to accept my innate poverty or become the slave of bitterness. I suspect that this will be the struggle for years to come.

Perhaps there are places within us, places of true home, that do not yet exist and are carved from the stone of our hearts only by suffering. Perhaps. Who will tell me if this is true? For if it is not, then I am subject to the cruelest delusion of all. Yet, if I were to know, I would cease to be vulnerable, and I might make my home in exile.

In the beginning I thought this country was clean and unspoiled, a place of promise fulfilled. Yet time has proved it a variation of desert, its beauty spectacular, but a desert nonetheless. Beyond each horizon emerges a new emptiness begging to be filled with our tears. Beyond it, promises the wind, lies the true and lasting land where life exults. If the wind from the promised land is at times cruel, it is to remind me that my journey is not yet complete.

O promised God ... whom I do not see, give me the courage...”

~Michael O’Brien (from Strangers and Sojourners)