Frying pan... to the side of my head.

Ruthless Trust, Brennan Manning

When the brilliant ehticist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at "the house of the dying" in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, "And what can I do for you?" Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. "What do you want me to pray for?" she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: "Pray that I have clarity." She said firmly, "No, I will not do that." When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of." When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God." "We ourselves have known and put our trust in God's love toward ourselves" (1 John 4:16). Craving clarity we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father's active goodness and unrestricted love. We often presume that trust will despel the confusion and illuminate the darkness, vanquish the uncertainty, and redeem the times. But the crowd of witnesses in Hebrews 11 testifies that this is not the case. Our trust does not bring final clarity on this earth. It does not silence the chaos or dull the pain or provide a crutch. When all else is unclear, the heart of trust says, as Jesus did on the cross, "Into your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23: 46). If we could free ourselves from the temptation to make faith a mindless assent to a dusty pawnshop of doctrinal beliefs, we would discover with alarm that th essence of biblical faith lies in trusting God. And, as Marcus Borg has noted, "The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. The first can leave us unchanged, the second intrinsically brings change." The faith that animates the Christian community is less a matter of believing in the existence of God than practical trust in his loving care under whatever pressure. The stakes here are enormous, for I have not said in my heart, "God exists," until I have said, "I trust you." The first assertion is rational, abstract, a matter perhaps of natural theology, the mind laboring at its logic. The second is "communion,
bread on the tongue from an unseen hand." Against insurmontable obstacles and without a clue as to the outcome, the trusting heart says, "Abba, I surrender my will and my life to you without any reservation and with boundless confidence, for you are my loving Father."