identity: the cloister walk, day two

quotes day two:

"[St. Therese of the Child Jesus] decides that 'perfection consists in being what God wants us to be.'"-pg 27

How transformative would it be if we stopped striving for the world's understanding of perfection and instead understood it to be a returning to the person that God has created us to be? I find that utterly freeing- and life-changing.

"But Jeremiah reminded me that the pain that comes from one's identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can't be escaped or pushed through. It must be gone through." -pg 38

I find deep beauty in thinking about how our identities and calls inform one another and create a tension that we must experience in order to more fully understand both of them. And it brings comfort to think that this tension is one that even the prophets experienced as they wrestled with what it meant to serve and love God with all of their beings.

"To be American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to a place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it."-pg 244

To surrender ourselves to the places that God leads us to- to the people, the community, the streets, the struggles, the hopes, the dreams, the passages of time.

And to be present. To show up when things aren't easy instead of running away. To acknowledge change instead of hide from it. To know its processes instead of to fear its waves. To rest in the knowledge that we were not created to run away but to experience the unfolding of life as it comes- in places, in people, in ourselves.