Start Looking

Thomas Merton once wrote, “If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: It is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.”

Stop thinking and start looking…

Sometime back, I heard the columnist and author David Brooks in an interview. He typically covers politics, but he was asked where he sees hope these days. He said this: 

“In Houston, there’s a little triangle where Latinos live within these three highways, and a woman from the northeast, a young woman, realized there were no after-school programs. So she moved in there, and she created an after-school program with hundreds of kids… In New Mexico at a Navajo reservation, a couple that had moved down from Minneapolis started a drug treatment program for 60-year-old ex-cons, not glamorous work… In D.C., I have two friends named Kathy and David, and they had a kid who went to a public school, and that kid had a friend who had no real home. His dad had split, mom had drug and health problems. So they said to the kid, “Come over. Stay with us. You can live with us… And then that kid had a friend in the same circumstance, and that kid had a friend. If you go to their house — and I do every Thursday — there’s 10, 15, 25 kids there 18 to 22 just getting some food. Last week, a young woman came and said she was 21. This was the first time she’d been around a dinner table since she was 11.” 

I personally think about the 100 bags of groceries piled up in our narthex two weeks ago for families in need. I think about a missionary we support and his program with street children in Ukraine. 

Over Thanksgiving, I texted a friend whose husband has been undergoing chemo for lung cancer. He was back in the emergency room for the second time that week. In my text, I said, “Becky, I can only imagine how scary and difficult this is.” And she responded, “Yes, very scary, and very difficult. But also, there is immense kindness and compassion…”

You know, if you only listen to the news, you would think the world is crumbling… But it’s not the whole picture, is it?

If one reaches the point where understanding fails…Merton says it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking.

In this world with so much darkness, so much division, so much anger, and hatred may you and I be the kind of people who look for the light breaking in. May we name it and celebrate it – even now. 

Let us pray: Give us eyes, O God, to see the goodness and beauty all around us. And give us hearts and minds to participate in it. Empower us to hold onto hope; through Christ, we pray. Amen.