Falling in love

I was given this quote from Fr Pedro Arrupe, sj this morning.

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings, what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

And this after a stroke that left him partially paralysed and unable to speak:

More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God's hands.

Going Home

This body will return to earth

become one, again,

with the round world: seep

into soil, dissolve

decay into richness

life-giving

dust, remnants of a kind

flame, scattered

motes of blown smoke

collected by the smallest of creatures;

water, the most of me, pattering

outside a listener's window becomes

Water of Life once more

runs sparkling

in a river, a lake, the wide

sea;

evening mist wets each

leaf and web glistening

droplets evaporate in the sun;

bank-teetering trees

flow with sap in Spring;

pregnant Autumn berries are disseminated

by migrating birds.

My body will encompass the Earth.

Thoughts, memories, affections, dreams -

the bright intangibles -

will they suffer composting

radical recycling

the soul's rendering down and return

to another soil in another ground

lose their form disperse?

These things I cannot know now.

I do not remember.

Nothing of me will be lost but

connections will dissolve.

I will be free

then.

10:30am Saturday 6 November 1993 (rev. October 1995)