A FEW DAYS OFF and again I’ve been grateful for the breathing space that affords time for the perennial “what, exactly, am I doing, and why?”
And I think that maybe that’s what priests and pastors are really for; what priests and pastors are really called to do and to be – people who carve out breathing space in their lives, to return again and again to the question, “what, exactly, am I doing, and why?” But then I want to go further and suggest that this is precisely the “priestly task” that all human persons are made for – and that this is why in any “breathing space” or “desert place” we’re never more than a hair’s breadth away from the deep sigh, from “A Yearning Too Deep For Words” – the title of the first chapter in Amos Smith’s Healing the Divide – newly delivered into my grateful hands. And the epigraph at the beginning of chapter 1 tells me that I must be careful to make some more breathing/reading space in the coming week:
I do not look for God because I think it is what I am supposed to do; I do it because I need to, because of a longing that is not of my own creationSt John of the Cross
