Sweet Restorer

I.

What is your beautiful work of restoration,

nursing back to health this battered heart,

torn and bleeding, scarred and hurting?

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Sweet Restorer of all that is lost,

Healer of all that is broken,

you put us back together, piece by piece,

with the adhesive of your grace, the thread of your love.

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You make us whole, not in our selves alone, enclosed,

but only in ceaseless dependency upon you,

as it was in the beginning, and was always meant to be:

pure childlike reliance on the love of the perfect Father,

and spousal receptivity and reciprocity before the Bridegroom-Son,

in the bond of the Spirit who is Gift and Communion,

cherished in himself, a beloved Person, the radiant fruit and fecundity

of the eternal kiss and embrace of the Father and the Son.

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Right in the midst of this eternal Intimacy, we were conceived,

in the tender thought and intention of your Love;

and from this inmost mystery of the blessed Trinity,

we were created, fashioned by the outpouring of Love’s fecundity,

a gift manifesting Love’s inner nature, yet wholly free and chosen,

a superfluous act and overflowing delight of the delight of Love

which has always and already been perfectly full and complete.

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You fashioned us to share in this fullness, abundantly,

from the abundance that communicates itself, not out of need,

but out of sheer generosity, out of abundant happiness,

like water that, overflowing its bounds, refuses to be contained.

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And yet, indeed, when we were fashioned, freely, by free Love,

Love longed for us and desired us, incarnations of beauty that we are,

with an inner movement of tender affection, heartfelt delight,

and drew near to us to enfold us in your own gift,

and to receive our reciprocal surrender back to you,

that through this gift we may share in your inner being,

in the life of pure love and intimacy that is eternally yours,

as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in everlasting delight.

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How then, in the fragments of time, do you restore our hearts,

wounded as they are by sin, trauma, and suffering,

so far from the fullness that you, in the beginning, willed?

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You simply weave, loving God of infinite tenderness,

through every moment of time, in your mysterious way,

with the surety and certainty of perfect wholeness to come,

and the cherishing love that delights in our beauty

even in each moment of time’s healing process,

bathed already in eternity’s light, and by eternity intersected,

such that, before your gaze, we already shine with undimmed beauty,

even as this beauty comes to fruition, in time, only over time.

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For to you, the fabric is still whole and entire,

broken and restored by grace from eternity’s perspective,

such that all of our woundedness and pain, our whole life’s journey,

is seen from the standpoint of our eternal destination, our true home,

where we stand before you, whole and entire, restored,

in the truth of our being healed by you, and in you fulfilled,

in the intimacy of your own life, that has become ours too.

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II.

How do you desire to restore this unique heart and life,

my loving Father, that you have given to me, and is yours,

broken and bleeding as it is, through this path of pain?

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How do you wish for me to abide, in fullness,

in the fullness of the life and love that you sing into me,

and which my heart wants to sing back to you,

and to sing to and for each of my brothers and sisters,

without ceasing, through every moment of life, and forever?

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I am scared to accept it and live it, Father,

because I am so scarred by the loss of all;

I am scared of my own blindness and folly,

of interpreting my own hopes and desires

as your true and certain will, given freely,

and thus to hurt you and others through my blindness.

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But it was your sweet and loving plan, Father,

that led me so, guiding even through my folly and mistakes,

to a place of humble fullness and clarity in simplicity:

the place littlest and least, the lowest, where rest is found in fullness,

and the fullness dwells in utter poverty and dependency.

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I should not fear, therefore, to accept what you give,

not clinging to it, not possessing, but being possessed

by the tenderness of your Love ever holding me;

to be buoyed up, to be enfolded, by your goodness,

manifest in the story that you are writing,

and want me to write, too, with my hand cradled in your own.

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What then?

The deep inner stillness, the abiding presence,

of unmediated contact with you, Holy Trinity, in prayer,

in contact with that breathtaking Beauty, that Mystery,

which, sober and quiet on the outside, so hidden,

is radiant abundance and echoing song deep within,

sending forth ripples from the humble littleness of this moment,

to echo forth in other hearts for their enrichment and their good.

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This is the center-point, the still-point, the place of Convergence,

where you have called me to abide, to dwell with undivided attention,

receiving what pours forth from your Heart here, in the Paschal Christ,

in the inner mystery of the divine life of Father, Son, and Spirit,

breathing forth your silent breath, your fullest Word beyond all words,

in the rich meaning that surpasses limited expression,

but touches, ravishes, and holds the heart intimately in silence.

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And this central reality, this unmediated contact,

pure gratuitous intimacy with you for its own sake, pure beauty,

present with a fullness, an intensity, in these prolonged moments,

the primal disposition and act of my humble life each day,

also lives in every other moment too, in life’s one fabric,

in act and word, play and work, suffering and joy,

in solitude and togetherness, silence and speech.

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For the heart that knows true silence is silent even in voice,

and hears the voice of Love even in the silence;

and the heart that knows true solitude is, in solitude, together,

and in togetherness dwells in the inner solitude of the self’s identity before you,

abiding naked before your gaze, defenseless, in the security that you give.

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Prayer and play, solitude and togetherness, silence and speech,

all of these shall dance, Father, in the uniqueness that you give,

and I only need to walk the path that you set before me, heart in heart,

and to write this story with my hand cradled securely in your own,

which really means to let the story be written for me, and through me,

as I simply open, receive, and rejoice, letting all born of me flow back to you.