While reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain several weeks ago I came upon this passage. It was written by Merton reflecting on his decision to leave a teaching post at St. Bonaventure’s for the monastic life at the Abbey at Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery where he would stay more than four decades, but it could easily have been written about my own decision – actually Tracey’s and my decision – to leave Massachusetts five years ago for Arizona. Merton wrote:

…I could no longer doubt that St. Bonaventure’s had outlived its usefulness in my spititual life. I did not belong there anymore. It was too tame, too safe, too sheltered. It demanded nothing of me. It had no particular cross. It left me to myself, belonging to myself, in full possession of my own will, in full command of all that God had given me that I might give it back to Him. As long as I remained there, I still had given up nothing, or very little, no matter how poor I happended to be.

Now it’s true I didn’t come out to Arizona searching for a closer relationship with God or my own particular cross. At least not to my knowledge. But that’s the way life is most often, I think – God gives each of us the opportunity to choose or reject our own crosses whenever that particular defining moment comes. Sometimes we never even recognize that moment or that cross until long after our choice was made. Or made for us.

Me, I never bought that nonsense that God only gives you what you can handle. But what I think God does give us out of our own personal choices and those things that happen to us simply out of the sheer randomness of life and our flawed and fallen natures is a cross of our own – a cross we can choose to accept or reject. Accepting that cross doesn’t make one better or braver or holier; but I think it does open one’s heart and soul to God’s redeeming and bountiful mercy and grace.

If I had never come out to Arizona, I would probably never have learned what it felt like to be truly lost, lonely, spiritually empty, and rejected by God; it was out of these very depths that I came to understand and accept my cross, and through God’s grace began the long road back to wherever it is I’m being called to be or do or whatever it is I’m on this journey for or to.