Wednesday, June 18
Thy steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in faithfulness to Thee.
—Psalm 26:3
So it can be with us: We too, like the Israelites, like the Psalmist, can walk in faithfulness toward God, because God’s steadfast light is before our eyes. Not perhaps as a pillar of fire in the desert night, but as a beacon nonetheless.
The German poet Rilke seems in his poem “A Walk” to be traveling in this luminous, faithful way toward his own transformation.
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are…
“So we are grasped
by what we cannot grasp,” which “changes us, even if we do not reach it, into
something which…we already are.”
This dynamic of
journeying toward something beyond ourselves, which we cannot comprehend, but
which claims us and transforms us into our truer selves even while we are still
on the way—this is the pilgrim way to which we each are called. It also speaks
of the mysterious “already but not yet” at the heart of our faith—we are on
the way, but in some sense we are already there.
God of fire and cloud, you lead us in ways we do not understand, by day and by night. Because your steadfast love always precedes us, we are able to walk in faithfulness to you. Thank you for continuing to change us, ever more deeply, into your own people.
The Signposts for June are written by Deborah Smith Douglas and originally appeared on explorefaith.org in May 2005.
