The Road Ahead

We read this prayer at the end of Sunday class today, written by T. Merton, it is called “the road ahead”:

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
And you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

It is an amazing prayer. One that realizes the spiritual journey is a voyage of self-discovery adrift on the currents of an unknowable sea. I suppose in this age of reason, the age of enlightenment, it is terrifying to admit how little we know. I suppose much of my own spiritual development is based on the realization that I don’t know what I believe, that one question has lead to another and another. Socrates once said that he knew that he didn’t know. That this lack of knowledge spurred him on to seek the truth wherever he sought it, and much of what he saw, about politics and morality, disturbed him and caused him to challenge authority.

It reminds me of the gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.

There is something unsettling about truth. Truth makes you comfortable in an uncomfortable world. If you know that things are going to be the same today as they were yesterday, the mind becomes complacent. There is no need to expect change, and so ultimately, you stop looking for it. The problem for me is that along the spiritual path we frequently find experiences that transcend explanation. These experience demand our attention. This continued work may lead to your discovering a spiritual connection within, without, and all around you; that you are spiritually connected with everything. Yet how can we understand these connections in human terms? It is like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Because one is always part of the system that one is observing, it is impossible to know anything about the system with certainty. We trust that are following the right road, though we may never know it. We trust that the road we follow will lead us down a spiritual path, but we cannot see it.

Merton’s prayer challenges us as ordinary people. Most of us, myself included, never truly fix ourselves along a spiritual path. We pray, we study, we may even fast or go to services, and still we doubt, we struggle, and we marvel, and yet, along the way find ourselves challenged by the ordinary, the everyday at every turn. Can a red light, and angry cashier, or a crying baby be the challenges of the divine leading us down the path of spiritual awareness? Relinquishing our doubts, we free our minds to the presence of an omnipresent god, one who shows up, not because we are looking for god, but because god it already there.