Autumn greetings! Harvest time -- the season for gathering the fruits of the earth ... a time when the words of blessing during Mass come so alive they seem to expand and encompass all the world. Blessed are you Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have the wheat of the field ... the fruit of the vine. You have made us co-creators with you giving us opportunities to grow in love, to bring peace and justice to the world, to feed the hungry and to heal the planet. We are graced with forgiveness ... we are blessed with hearts that unite us to one another. Blessed are you Creator God, you who give each one of us the light to be ourselves! May we be led deeper into the Silence, that we might come into full harmony, to full union with the Heart of our hearts.
All those magical, predestined, and irreplaceable people and places are not really that, not really the answer. Rather, we have to stay with the hunger of the question and from its energy fill the space with our own choices, and then with the new things which will be called forth from us in the unexpected poverty and limitation in which our necessarily imperfect choices necessarily situate us.