Random Musings 3

We can only survive the surrounding darkness if we have love in our hearts, such a love that can survive the intense testing that comes with living in a world full of selfishness and treachery. This love has marked my life, and it is a costly love, one of the costliest decisions I have ever made in life, when as a young adolescent I gave my consent for that love, that eternal and divine presence of God to have full sway in my life. I knew this would be an act of supreme renunciation, and that I would never enjoy what is commonly thought of as a normal life. This isn't to say that my life at that time was anything ideal. My parents were negotiating a bitter and nasty divorce and I was still reeling from multiple abuse from all members of my family (I was the youngest, and most vulnerable), and at fourteen I was already experimenting with drugs and alcohol. My childhood was stolen from me, and I really could see nothing left for me, so I threw in my lot and surrendered my life to God. I am sixty-three now, and really, I cannot think of a time in my life when I have felt better, more well, happier, and more willing to trust others, and none of this has come easy. There have been years and years of setbacks, disappointments, and some of the cruellest betrayals that one could imagine. I have lost my entire family and survived hundreds of deaths. I have been betrayed by people I thought I could trust, sometimes treated with the cruelest rejection and exclusion. I have suffered homelessness and extreme poverty. My closest friends have turned against me. There were individuals and groups after my life, and I barely survived some really scary scenarios. Yet, throughout, I have somehow survived all this. Even though I am still poor, I have managed to remain employed in a profession where I am respected and honoured, and I am comfortable in a subsidized apartment, so that I am no longer at risk of being homeless. I have friends, and some precious new friends I am growing to trust. I can travel every year and am fluent now in a second language, Spanish. I have friends with whom I can stay and visit in Colombia and in Costa Rica. This love has carried me and has sustained me throughout some of the darkest episodes of life and now I feel like I have emerged into the light. all this began to change for me as I came to accept the gift of joy that God was waiting to give me, and then I came to see that life is indeed a gift, and that every moment of our lives is a sacred and precious gift to be cherished and honored. I believe that God can implant in us a capacity for love that will survive and will also overcome all the sewage around us, but it is going to hurt, sometimes it is going to hurt just awful, but it’s a matter of not giving up. There are too many other people depending on our overcoming this garbage that surrounds us and for this reason alone we cannot give up. We have to keep going, we have to keep holding on, even if the world as we know it seems about to end. We have in ourselves the capacity to be the seeds of renewal that will help regenerate this planet and our lives as a broken lost and wounded humanity that is still desperately trying to find their way home. And we will find our way home.