When the Rain Comes

An odd day, this.

I woke this morning from a dream where I was reading some sort of history book. It was very much like the big thick history books published in the 50s and 60s that I read when I was much younger, the kind you can still get at second hand book stores. I could smell the book dust.

The text itself was so decidedly peculiar that I wrote as much of it down as I could remember when I awoke.

And each of the accepting Sons of Aset wrote on the final page of the scriptures they copied “As God giveth me eyes to see, I accept all that is written”. This they followed by the number of centuries that had elapsed since the time of the Nativity among the Jews in the Empire of Rome, to remind themselves that it was yet the early centuries and that they could not be expected to comprehend the fullness of Salvation’s theology.

I confess that when I had written this down, I wrote “As God gives me eyes to see, I accept all that is written” in two of my Bibles, along with the approximate date I acquired them. Probably foolishness, but I’m certainly not my most coherent in the early morning. I have no idea from what recesses of my mind this might have come.

I had dinner with my friend Father Bryan Dolejsi this evening. Among many other topics, we discussed my possible call to the diaconate, since he is now the Archdiocese’s vocations director. Apparently, they already had a file on me. Who knew?

At any rate, we discern not isolated and in a vacuum, but with the Church, and it looks as though the Archdiocese of Seattle will not be calling another class to discern for the diaconate for several years, perhaps five or six.

Benedicamus Domino.

So if God is calling me to the diaconate, He is clearly not doing so yet.

And still, there is something that I’m not getting. I feel, and not for the first time by a long shot, a call to …. something. We can do no better, perhaps, than to adopt the affirmation of Blessed John Henry Newman as our own:

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.

Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me — still He knows what He is about.

Indeed he does.

I fear I ramble more than usual, and so for your consideration, dear reader, I will leave you with this. It is one of my favourite songs, and it seems especially appropriate today, on a day when the rain falls both physically and metaphorically, on the just and the unjust.

Time is so infinitely odd.