Angleys, Nico – Witnesses to Hope

This time of year always brings to mind this poem because, indeed, my part of the world is charged with God’s grandeur.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

We all go through periods of darkness. I hope what Dom Hubert vanZeller has to say in his book, The Inner Search, helps you as much as it has helped me.

“Darkness is not only prayer going wrong; it is everything going wrong. And over and above this it is having to believe that everything is going right.”

“Darkness is failure . . . Darkness is fear, is regret, is doubt. Darkness is looking back an saying: ‘I have been deluded from the start; it has all been a mistake.’ Darkness is looking forward and saying: ‘I do not know what to do next; I have lost m way and it is too late now to find it.’ It is the endlessness of darkness that constitutes a peculiar pain.”

“Darkness is not only when our ideals are shown to be unattainable, but when they are shown to be not ideals at all. When they are seen to be selfish ambitions.
“Darkness is not only when our motives are misunderstood and condemned, but when they are seen by ourselves to have been worthy of condemnation–when we realize that we have ourselves misunderstood them all along.
“Darkness is not only when our zeal for souls is blocked at every turn, but when we discover that it never has been zeal for souls. Darkness is seeing what a zeal we have for self.
“Only when we know that we have nothing of our own to show for our service of God, that we have no offering to make but our failures, sins, helplessness and folly are we made empty enough to be restocked with new graces. It is light-through-darkness that brings us to this stage.”

“We have to be disillusioned.”

“The essential vocation, the primary call to which our response is of supreme moment, is not to this or that exercise but to love. This is the initial grace–love. To work out this grace on our own is beyond us. We need more grace. We need Love itself to do it for us.
“Love works in faith, and faith means the night . . . . Anyone can give a notional assent to the proposition: ‘I am a weak man’; what God want is a more absolute recognition than that.”

“Neither books nor directors nor penance nor systems of prayer can do service for the training which the Spirit Himself imparts. The soul must ‘be still and wait for the Lord.’ Always there will be that pendulum swing of darkness and light, knowing and unknowing, learning and unlearning, losing and finding again.”