Lost or Found

Mary Morrison

Who would want to feel whole when he was not in fact whole? Who would want to feel good when he was not in fact good? The answer is, I do, and so does nearly everybody else. We spend all our interior time trying desperately to feel whole, to feel good, on the theory that it is only when we feel so that we are so.

Now there’s not much sense to this. If God alone is good (as we are told), if God alone is whole, then clearly any feelings we may have of goodness, of wholeness of our own are false, and worse than false because they keep us from ever looking for the truth, or even seeing it by chance. Because, valuing our wholeness as we do, when we happen to catch any random glimpse of true wholeness (which cannot help shattering our own) what do we do? We rush frantically back into the refuge of our own little wholeness, ours, the one we have made for ourselves. And if we can no longer find it we weep and wail and think that we are lost because our shelter is lost.

Lost it is and lost it should be. But we are not lost, only found, and if we can learn to live indefinitely in this roofless, wall-less state, this state of correction, the finding process can go on indefinitely. Because God is whole, we can trust his wholeness to operate in us and need none of our own. Because God is good, we can trust his goodness to operate in us and need none of our own.

How are we going to learn to live in this state of correction, though? I think that the first step is to be thankful for it—to look at it and see what it is in fact good for, even from our hopeless, hapless, worm’s-eye point of view.

Even from there, it’s worth a lot. Here we are in a wall-less, roofless state of mind: we can see, we can hear, we are wide open, everything that comes to us speaks with the voice of God. There is no other state in which this is so true. The happier ones, the states not under bondage, when we are free to act, are relatively blind and deaf, though they do feel better while we are in them. But I think that whenever we pause on a vantage-point and look back, it is those dreary stretches in which we can see flowers blooming along every step of the way. There all the pools are filled with water. If we have ever been able to look back like that, only once, we know that it’s true: “He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with joy, bearing his sheaves with him.”

In ordinary life the two states alternate—correction and the focused state. But I think that on looking back at both we would have no doubt which we would choose, if it had to come to a choice.

And I think, too, that though in us the states are separated, in the saints they are fused: the saints can be under correction without feeling lost, in focused action without narrowing their vision.