God of My Life – A Prayer

I should like to speak with you, my God, and yet what else can I speak of but you? Indeed, could anything at all exist which had not been present with you from all eternity, which dint’ have its true home and most intimate explanation in your mind and heart? Isn’t everything I ever say really a statement about you?

On the other hand, if I try shyly and hesitantly, to speak to you about yourself, you will still be hearing about me. For what could I say about you except that you are my God, the God of my beginning and end, God of my joy and my need, God of my life?

Of course you are endlessly more than merely the God of my life – if that’s all you were, you wouldn’t really be God at all. But even when I think of your towering majesty, even when I acknowledge you as someone who has no need of me, who is infinitely far exalted above the lowly valleys through which I drag out the paths of my life – even then I have called you once again by the same name, God of my life.

And when I give praise to you as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when I confess the thrice holy mystery of your life, so eternally hidden in the abysses of your infinity that it leaves behind in creation no sign that we could make out by ourselves, am I not still praising you as the God my life? Even granting that you had revealed to me this secret of your own inner life, would I able to accept and realize this mystery if your life had not become my life through grace? Would I be able to acknowledge and love you, Father, and you, eternal Word of the Father’s heart, and you, Spirit of the Father and the Son, if you had not deigned to become through grace the triune God of my life?

But what am I really saying, when I call you my God, the God of my life? That you are the meaning of my life? the goal of my wanderings? The consecration of my actions? The judgment of my sins? The bitterness of my bitter hours and my most secret joy? My strength, which turns my own strength into weakness? Creator, sustainer, pardoner, the one both far and near? Incomprehensible? God of my brethren? God of my fathers?

Are there any titles which I needn’t give you? And when I have listed them all, what have I said? If I should take my stand on the shore of your endlessness and shout into the trackless reaches of your being all the words I have ever learned in the poor prison of my little existence, what should I have said? I should never have spoken the last word about you.

Then why do I even begin to speak of you? Why do you torment me with your infinity, If I can never really measure it? Why do you constrain me to walk along your paths, if they lead only to the awful darkness of your night, where only you can see? For us, only the finite and tangible is real and near enough to touch: Can you be real and near to me, when I must confess you as infinite?

Why have you burnt your mark in my soul baptism? Why have you kindled in me the flame of faith, this dark light which lures us out of the bright security of our little huts into your night? And why have you made me your priest, one whose vocation it is to be with you on behalf of men and women, when my finiteness makes me gasp for breath in your presence?

Look at the vast majority of people, Lord – excuse me if I presume to pass judgment on them – but do they often think of  you? Are you the first beginning and last end for them, the one without whom their minds and hearts can find no rest? Don’t they manage to get along perfectly well without you? Don’t they feel quite at home in this world which they know so well, where they can be sure of just what they have to reckon with? Are you anything more for them than the one who sees to it that the world stays on its hinges, so that they won’t have to call on you? Tell me, are you the God of their life?

I don’t really know, Lord, if my complaint is just or not – who knows the heart of another person? You alone are the reader of hearts, O God, and how can I expect to understand the heart of another when I don’t even understand my own? It’s just that I can’t help thinking of those others, because – as you well know, since you see into the depths of my heart, O hidden God from whom nothing is hidden – often enough I feel in myself a secret longing to be like them or, at least, to be as they seem to be.

Lord, how helpless I am when I try to talk to you about yourself! How can I call you anything but the God of my life? And what have I said with that title, when no name is really adequate? I’m constantly tempted to creep away from you in utter discouragement, back to the things that are more comprehensible, to things which my heart feels so much more at home that it does with your mysteriousness.

And yet, where shall I go? If the narrow hut of this earthly life with its dear, familiar trivialities, its joys and sorrows both great and small – if this were my real home, wouldn’t it still be surrounded by your distant endlessness? Could the earth be my home without your far-away heaven above it?

 Suppose I tried to be satisfied with what so many today profess to be the purpose of their lives. suppose I defiantly determined to admit my finiteness, and glory in it alone. I could only begin to recognize this finiteness and accept it as my sole destiny, because I had previously so often started out into the vast reaches of limitless space, to those hazy horizons where your endless life is just beginning.

Without you, I should founder helplessly in my own dull and groping narrowness. I could never feel the pain of longing, not even deliberately resign myself to being content with this world, had not my mind again and again soared out over its own limitations into the hushed reaches which are filled by you alone, the silent infinite. Where should I flee before you, when all my yearning for the unbounded, even my bold trust in my littleness, is really a confession of you?

What else is there that I can tell you about yourself, except that you are the one without you whom I cannot exist, the eternal God from whom alone I, a creature of time, can draw that strength to live, the infinity who gives meaning to my finiteness?  And when I tell you all this, then I have given myself my true name, the name I ever repeat when I pray in David’s Psalter, Tuus sum ego. I am the one who belongs not to himself, but to you. I know no more that this about myself, nor about you, O God of my life, infinity of my finiteness.

What a poor creature you have made me, o God! All I know about you and about myself is that you are the eternal mystery of my life. Lord, what a frightful puzzle a human being is! He belongs to you, and you are the incomprehensible – incomprehensible in your being, and even more so in your ways and judgments. For if all you dealings with me are acts of your freedom, quite unmerited gifts of your grace which knows no “why,” if my creation and my whole life hang absolutely on your free decision, if all my paths are, after all, your paths and, therefore, unsearchable, then, Lord, no amount of questioning will ever fathom your depths – you will still be the incomprehensible, even when I see you face to face.

But if you were not incomprehensible, you would be inferior to me, for my mind could grasp and assimilate you. You would belong to me, instead of I to you. And that would truly be hell, if I should belong only to myself! It would be the fate of the damned, to be doomed to pace up and down for all eternity in the cramped and confining prison of my own finiteness.

But can it be that you are my true home? Are you the one who will release me from my narrow little dungeon? Or are you merely adding another torment to my life, when you throw open the gates leading out upon your broad and endless plain? Are you anything more than my own great insufficiency, if all my knowledge leads only to your incomprehensibility? Are you merely eternal unrest for the restless soul? Must every question fall dumb before you, unanswered? Is your only response the mute “I will have it so,” that so coldly smothers my burning desire to understand?

But I am rambling on like a fool – excuse me, O God. You have told me through your Son that you are the God of my love, and you have commanded me to love you. Your commands are often hard because they enjoin the opposite of what my own inclinations would lead me to do, but when you bid me love you, you are ordering something that my  own inclinations would never even dare to suggest: to love you, to come intimately close to you, to love your very life. You ask me to lose myself in you, knowing that you will take me to your heart, where I may speak on loving, familiar terms with you, the incomprehensible mystery of my life. And all this because you are love itself.

Only in love can I find you, my God. In love the gates of my soul spring open, allowing me to breathe a new air of freedom and forget my own petty self. In love my whole being streams forth out of the rigid confines of narrowness and anxious self-assertion, which make me a prisoner of my own poverty and emptiness. In love all the powers of my soul flow out toward you, wanting never more to return, but to lose themselves completely in you, since by your love you are the inmost center of my heart, closer to me than I am to myself.

But when I love you, when I manage to break out the narrow circle of self and leave behind the restless agony of unanswered questions, when my blinded eyes no longer look merely from afar and from the outside at your unapproachable brightness, and much more when you yourself, O incomprehensible one, have become through love the inmost center of my life, then I can bury myself entirely in you, o mysterious God, and with myself all my questions.

Love such as this wills to possess you as you are – how could it desire otherwise? It wants you yourself, not your reflection in the mirror of its own spirit. It wants to be united with you alone, so that in the very instant which it gives up possession of itself, it will have not just your image, but your very Self.

Love wants you as you are, and just as love knows that it itself is right and good and needs no further justification, so you are right and good for it, and it embraces you without asking for any explanation of why you are as you are. Your “I will have it so” is love’s greatest bliss. In this state of joy my mind no longer tries to bring your forcibly down to its level, in order to wrest from you your eternal secret, but rather love seizes me and carries me up to your level, into you.

When I abandon myself in love, then you are my very life, and your incomprehensibility is swallowed up in love’s unity. When I am allowed to love you, the grasp of your very mystery becomes a positive source of bliss. Then the farther your infinity is removed from my nothingness, the greater is the challenge to my love. The more complete the dependence of my fragile existence upon your unsearchable counsels, the more unconditional must be the surrender of my whole being to you, beloved God. The more annihilating the incomprehensibility of your ways and judgments, the greater must be the holy defiance of my love.

And my love is all the greater and more blessed, the less my poor spirit understands of you.

God of my life, incomprehensible, be my life. God of my faith, who lead me into your darkness – God of my love, who turn your darkness into the sweet light of my life, be now the God of my hope, so that you will one day be the God of my life, the life of eternal love.

Fr. Albert Leo

Precious Blood Missionaries