Humility

Forces Greater Than Ourselves

Sooner or later we come into contact with ‘forces greater than ourselves,’ which if we’re not ready for them can sweep us up before we know what’s happened. The created world holds a litany of awesome forces –– oceans, deserts, mountains; behemoths, leviathans; the cosmos; all majestically dwarf us. Consider love, loving an other, or for that matter truly giving ourselves in love to anything, is a willing entrance into uncharted territory defined as much by what we don’t know and our deep vulnerability as anything else. Then there’s God, unknowable yet present in every moment of our lives, how are we to step up in encounters with her? Daunting to be sure, but this is the situation we find ourselves in. So is there a stance we can adopt that might keep us from being overwhelmed and at the same time set us up to be receptive to the encounter with these great forces?