Saturday, January 2, 2021

The Rev. Dick Siener

Faith

In this time of our lives when there is no "normal life", I have been enormously inspired by Henry Nouwen, a spiritual writer and mentor to many. I share some of his insights from his book, Here and Now, Living in the Spirit. One of our "faithless fears and worldly anxieties" is to be overwhelmed by a fatalistic response to severe problems in our earthly lives. Nouwen offers us this response, "Fatalism is the attitude that makes us live as passive victims of exterior circumstance beyond our control. The opposite of fatalism is faith. Faith is the deep trust that God's love is stronger than all the anonymous powers of the world and can transform us from victims of darkness into servants of light. It is important to identify the many ways in which we think, speak, or act with fatalism and, step by step, to convert them into moments of faith. This movement from fatalism to faith is the movement that will remove the cold darkness from our hearts and transform us into people whose trust in the power of love can, indeed, make mountains move.

I invite us all to focus in our spiritual journey on our actions of love which reveal God's light amidst the darkness of our world. I pray that "God is light and in God there is no darkness at all". May we walk in the light as God is the light and together, may we minister supported by God's love to this broken world.