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- 2/3/2001 Email From Joe Egan to Frank Sisco
- Hi Frank,
- I was struggling with the "temptation to curse the universe
and him who made it." After much prayer really accept the
truth contained in the prayer. Then I remembered what TdC had
written.
- Feel free to use it any way you see fit. It might fit into
your "Prayer" section on Seniormusings.corn
- It is great being in touch with you.again
- From Joe
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- It is I, Be Not Afraid
- Ah, you know it yourself, Lord, through having borne the
anguish of it as man:
On certain days the world seems a terrifying thing: huge, blind
and brutal. It buffets us about, and drags us along with complete
indifference. Heroically, man has created a more or less habitable
zone of light and warmth in the midst of the great, cold, black
waters. A place where people have eyes to see, hands to help,
and hearts to love.
But how precarious that habitation is! At any moment, the vast
and horrible thing may break in through the cracks. The thing
which we try to forget is always there - separated from us by
a flimsy partition: fire, pestilence, storms, earthquakes or
disease. These callously sweep away in one moment what we had
so laboriously built up and beautified by our intelligence and
love.
- Since my dignity as a man, O God, forbids me to close my
eyes to this - like an animal or a child - that I may not succumb
to the temptation to curse the universe and him who made it,
teach me to adore it by seeing you concealed within it.
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- "It is I, be not afraid." The things in our life
which terrify us, the things that threw you yourself into agony
in the garden, are, ultimately, only the appearance, the matter
of one and the same sacrament.
We have only to believe. And the more threatening reality appears,
the more firmly and desperately must we believe. Then, little
by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then
smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms.
- Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- "Fides substantia rerum
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