Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
How silently,
how silently
the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts
to human hearts
the blessings of his heaven.No ear may hear his coming,
but in this world of sin,
where meeks souls will
receive him still
the dear Christ enters in.—Phillips Brooks, 1868
A couple summers ago, I wrote “On waiting and squirming” about “periods during which I have difficulty finding God’s reassuring
…Being of melancholic temperament, my Quaker practice is occasionally reduced to long periods of inner struggle between faith and circumstance.
These are not periods of doubting God or of doubting that I can rely upon God.
Rather, they are periods during which I have difficulty finding God’s reassuring silence in the midst of my own emotional noise. Or, sometimes, in the midst of a kind of emotional shut-downness, when prolonged distress has dulled itself into exhaustion.
As
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