"She wore that phony smile on her face, I guess like a bandage on a wounded place..."

Deep calls to deep. And sometimes I forget that there's a deep out there. Sometimes, when I spend more time talking about God than I do talking /to/ Him, I make Him smaller than He is. I make Him manageable, understandable, comprehensible. He becomes a facet, albeit still the most important facet, of my life. And, oh the pride, I imagine Him to be a facet that I have already figured out. But deep calls to deep, and my soul is just an echo of the call that I hear. I try to sound the bottom of this ocean floor, but my soul cannot cry out except in diminishing echo of Your "FIAT". My spirit is just a rustle of the wind that was breathed into me. And I am more a part of this rolling thunder than I am a part of any of you. I am more closely related to this swelling wave than I am to any of you.

Yet, I know that I try to love any one of you more than I try to love that Deep. I am always trying to love the other soft echos of that clarion call that has gone on from Time's beginning. And so I become distracted, and I seek approval, looking for the wind in the rustle that it leaves, and trying to fill my soul with that pure note by listening to its reverberations. And I know that I need to seek only God. Because I am /one/ with that Deep, I am drawn from those depths... and not from any of you.

And far too often, I think that I need to look outside of myself for that ocean, but the living water has a wellspring reaching deep into my own heart! I let things pile up over the opening of that well and I forget that it swells up, deep underneath my dead and worldly concerns. It is so easy to think that our spiritual life, that our relationship with God exists externally: in the people that we serve, in the prayers and praises that we offer, in His voice that seems to come from Heaven. But it comes from our heart. Our soul was awakened at our conception by that alarum and called into action! And that call to arms still exists within our hearts. The waters of grace do not reach us by a tributary and then sit stagnant in our hearts! Rather: the unfathomable depths of the ocean of Love froths in our very soul, always renewing and breaking forth into life! The Spirit cries out: "ABBA" from the most intimate center of our being, and we know that we are His children. Allelulia.

I'm afraid that I'm not being very clear: GOD IS LOVE, AND WHOEVER REMAINS IN LOVE REMAINS IN GOD AND GOD IN HIM.

"While I kept the keys to every old lock just in case..."
-L