Standing in Circles

I decided not to attend St. John's this morning, or any other faith terminal, but I did purchase a book by the author Rev. Linda suggested, a priest named Henri Nouwen. I did some research into his biography; he seemed to fit nicely into the mold of the postwar Ivy League catholic intellectual that focused on the social gospel while advocated humanity carefully manage its ability to destroy its own surroundings. Someone who a person in my tradition would never have even heard of, while reading Wilkerson, Nee and Colson. He did bare some striking resemblances to Merton in the isolation of his journey but it was in his poignant personal reflections that I found the true struggle that catholics try to atone for through ceremony, mainliners try to mitigate through action and fundamentalists try to overcome through sheer will.

I went with a title that most reflected my own condition, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom. It sounded hopeful enough while still being firmly rooted in the torment that punctuates so much of our lives. I was disappointed to find out that the book is comprised mostly of devotional-type entries, I was anticipating a C.S. Lewis-like biography of Nouwen's own struggles. Nonetheless, it is insightful. As with my own life, I am trying to find a unifying theme, a consistent undercurrent that purposefully draws me to (?) and conveniently ties all the loose end up in a bow.

Perhaps the journey is not a journey in the colloquial sense of the word. It is not so much staying on the path as it is finding it beneath the distractions and distortions. Perhaps the path isn't linear at all, bringing one from point A to point B, but rather cylindrical drawing one into every deepening circles of detail. That would at least explain the feeling I have of having been here, or somewhere that appears very much like here, before. Maybe the path enables the sojourner to revisit past events and perceive them in a new light and each time that light gets brighter, illuminating more detail until it becomes so brilliant that it acts like a mirror revealing more of the inside than what is outside.