How Do We Reach the Promised Land?
Friday, February 27, 2026
Father Richard invites us to take a journey of faith. It may be plagued by uncertainty, but we can trust in God’s presence along the way.
Sometimes it is only when we look back over the years, many of them spent in the wilderness, that we see the providence of God. When we were traveling through those years, none of them may have seemed very glorious. But when we look back, we can see how God was leading us, and we behold the beauty of God’s saving love.
Yet when we are in the middle of it, it may not seem very beautiful at all. It may seem quite ordinary. Usually we cannot tell for certain if God is acting in our life. In fact, we may be able to make a strong case against it. Just look at the prophets, Job, or Jesus! The way of faith is not a way of certitude.
I can imagine quite easily that Moses faltered on occasion. He must have hesitated and wondered whether God was really leading him, or whether he was just on some big ego trip. If Moses saw some visible apparition or heard some audible sounds which made him absolutely certain that he was right, Moses’s way would not have been a way of faith. It would have been a way of knowledge.
We are all called to a way of faith. At each step God asks us to trust, to say yes, to put our lives in God’s hands. It’s like walking around in a pitch-dark room, afraid that we’re going to bump into something or trip or fall. We put our hands out in front of us and walk very slowly. We want desperately to have our pathway illuminated. We want to know where we are going and how we are going to get there. Yet a voice comes to us out of the darkness, asking us to trust. We want certitude, but instead God asks us to have faith.
Our faith and our trust, then, are in God—not in our own cleverness, strategies, or planning, not in our status or money. In the desert, all our idols are taken away from us and our security is gone. The desert, the darkness, is the school of surrender, the place for learning total dependence on God.
Very often we experience faith in its purest form when we are in the midst of suffering. Perhaps we grew up picturing ourselves as some kind of glorious martyr (or perhaps that was just me), but when we are in the middle of it, it’s not glorious at all. It all seems so meaningless, so unjust and wrong, yet that’s the heart of the suffering. The essence of the desert experience is that we just want to get out it. If we could find a pattern in it, it would have some meaning. If we could find some purpose in it, it might give us a sense of direction. We truly suffer when we can find neither of those things, and yet even then, God is present.
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John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“Let nothing disturb you.
Let nothing frighten you.
All things pass away.
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
They who have God
lack nothing.
God alone is enough.”
– Teresa of Avila, Spanish Mystic
As a Head-oriented person on the Enneagram (I am an Enneagram 5), I am most prone to fall into fearful thinking. Shame does not really get to me, and neither does anger (though I can get to both in certain circumstances).
So this prayer or piece of wisdom from Teresa of Avila has stuck with me for quite a while. “Let nothing disturb you” gets to me right off the bat, but then it follows up with “Let nothing frighten you.”
Boom.
Boom.
But to close with “God alone is enough”?
Wow.
2.
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French Jesuit
This week, I recorded another Begin Again podcast (The link is below.)
Although it was interrupted a few times by our puppy, Maggie, it helped to anchor me more throughout the day.
Teilhard was a French Jesuit priest who was also a paleontologist and archaeologist. All this means is that Teilhard had a long view of time. For him, he was not threatened by the idea that it might have taken the universe 13.8 billion years to get to you and me, and it might take another 13.8 billion years for the full Christ Project to come to fruition!
God clearly has a profound appreciation for the slow unfolding of time, and that is an uncomfortable truth for us, who live in time.
3.
“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.“
The three letters of John in the New Testament are letters that I do not visit often. Most people find good things in 1 John and then trail off when they come to 2 John or 3 John.
One thing that is fascinating is how the Johannine letters use the symbolic language of “light and darkness” and use absolute statements to make a point. There isn’t a whole lot of paradox in 1 John! It is rather straightforward and black-and-white in its thinking, which is what I think gives it such a punch when you read it.
“If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.”
Dang.
That is convicting.
Of course, my judgmental mind goes toward people whom I believe are “walking in darkness,” but that is using the Bible inappropriately.
I should be focused on myself (in a healthy way).
I, of all people, need to check myself and evaluate every so often whether or not I am living “according to the light of God as revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Hopefully, if I am even asking the question of myself, that is an indication of something!
4.
“We must believe that, morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish Philosopher
Surely, none of you are surprised to see Abraham Joshua Heschel again.
As a Jewish philosopher and rabbi, he was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton, and was quite outspoken during the Civil Rights Movement.
5.
“Myths convey the essential truths, the primary reality of life itself.”
– JRR Tolkien, Author of The Lord of the Rings
Stories suck me in.
If it is a really good story, I will want to watch it again or read it again.
However, in the past week, we watched Marty Supreme, and I must say, I didn’t enjoy it. On one level, it kept your attention because the main character isn’t exactly a hero and is rather doggone narcissistic about achieving his own dream.
If the movie was trying to depict reality, it didn’t align with my understanding of reality.
Yes, my understanding of the world allows space for chaos, paradox, and even evil, but ultimately those things will have to bow and exit before goodness, beauty, truth, and love are given their full expression.
The stories we tell… they matter.
And they not only matter because they potentially describe what is, but also because they can inspire us towards what might be. I believe that there is an essential truth: there is always hope that things can turn for the better, that people can change and grow, and that we do not have to be stuck in our ways.
