Quoting Reen
Hello, dear heart.
I didn’t realize that you were online,
until I saw your post. *
I’m waaay out of my depth, in offering any thought, whatever,
on adoration.
You know what I was thinking about? It is, evidently, the
custom - or was the custom - to spread a bit of honey,
on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, so that a child would learn to love the letters.
That literal sweetness would speak to a child.
Little cakes, with verses on them, might follow.
And I made the connection:
When we first begin life with God, He may give us what we need,
in terms of a sense of His comforting presence. In a real sense,
a “land of milk and honey.”
C.S. Lewis once described the withdrawal of the sense of His
presence, in the Screwtape Letters.* [paraphrased]
“What we wish to avoid, is a human being looking around in
a universe, where no sense of His presence is to be found -
asks why he has been abandoned, and yet obeys.”
Surely, this must have described Mother Teresa’s experience.
To love Him - while feeling no sense of His presence, whatever.
To keep His command to “love one another,” by caring for those
who were abandoned by society, and left all alone.
stanford.edu/group/ivfaculty/Essays/mtki0.jpg
Did she understand their aloneness, their sense of being
bereft, in life - because she, too, knew what it felt like,
to feel all alone…seemingly abandoned by God?
Was not that what Christ felt, hanging on the cross?
“Why have You abandoned Me?”
To not feel His presence, may be a gift from Him.
That He entrusts us - with this sense of a lack of His presence.
Given my druthers, I’d prefer the honey.
http://bestsmileys.com/nono/9.gif
Best,
