by Martha Woodroof
"Now, I don’t mean to imply that Thomas Merton offers this story as anything other than a casual, back-ward glance. Yet while reading it, I had what I think of one of those light bulb moments of faith, a jump in awareness of what it means to me (or you or anyone) to live in partnership with God. Reading this slight anecdote from a monk’s childhood, it came to me that one of major gifts of faith is the persistent presence of hope in one’s head and heart. And by hope, I mean a kind of blessed, essential calmness—a deep certainty that what’s truly indispensable to one’s sense of well-being is fundamentally unaffected by what happens; that it has to do, instead, with rooting one’s life in a partnership with God. And so, it came to me while reading that paragraph written by Thomas Merton, that I was now a truly hopeful person, because I feel certain that no matter what happens to me, I—as a person of faith—will go on feeling comfortable with who I am in the world as it is. "
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