English 
Description
This post is also available in:
العربية (Arabic)
Light When It Comes Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything
On finding joy and spiritual meaning in life’s small moments
We all have moments of joy, moments that move us somehow, spiritual moments that we can’t quite put a finger on.
But then we rush on and soon forget. In this book Chris Anderson encourages us to remember and share such moments. What he writes will inspire readers who are hurting, doubting, or searching to find wisdom and meaning in their lives.
Drawing on an ancient prayer tradition, the examen of conscience, Anderson spurs readers to take stock of their own experiences. He shows how the examen can serve as a simple but powerful way to remember moments of light, of struggle, of joy.
And however small or fleeting these moments are, through them God is always calling and meeting us.
The shock of stars at five a.m. The bright belt of Orion and the arc and sweep of those other brilliant, nameless lights and even the blackness glittering. The smell of wood smoke and fir. The cold, damp air.
I hear the voice of my wife calling from another room: “Do you know where I put my book?”
Standing at the sink rinsing out a bowl, I look up and see a strand of a spider web rising and falling, made visible by the wind. Then another and another, looping from the willow to the roof. Glinting on and off. As if all the shingles and boards of the house are secretly bound with thread.
We all have moments like this, moments that move us somehow, that seem to mean something we can’t quite put into words, but we are embarrassed by them or we doubt them or in the rush of things that happen to us each day we forget about them.
My purpose in this book is to help you remember the moments, and to trust in those moments, to believe in them, because however small they are, however fleeting, moments like this can lead us to God.
This is the idea of the examen of conscience, the much-loved prayer of St. Ignatius, that God is always calling us, the Spirit is always moving in our lives. The examen is a simple but powerful way of remembering, and I mean the scenes and stories that follow to be examples of how it works, how it keeps deepening and opening up.
At the end of each day:
we reئember the light and give thanks for the light;
we remember the darkness and ask for forgiveness, and refuge, and strength;
and we let it all go–we ask for the grace to follow the light, to know what we should do—but then we leave it all to God, trusting in his kindness.
The light of grace is always shining, it’s always pouring down, though it’s refracted and scattered and easy to miss, and so one way to pray is to look back on the moments of our day and recall when we saw the light breaking through, and when we didn’t, when we felt it being blocked or opposed.
And then releasing–waiting, too, for an idea to form or an intuition to emerge about what God is calling us to do—but waiting with the knowledge that these things are mysteries, beyond understanding, and trying to give up our need for control.
Be not afraid, Jesus says. We don’t have to resolve the tensions, and we don’t have to reconcile the opposites, and we can’t. All we can do is live with things the way they are, trusting the days to God–remembering the darkness and remembering the light, and holding them both in our hearts, together, side-by-side.
Light When It Comes Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything
For more books, click here
This post is also available in:
العربية (Arabic)
