My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following Your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust You always
though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for You are ever with me,
and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.
—Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
I love this prayer.
I love its honesty,
and how it settles me into
trust with the words,
“You are ever with me,
and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
But there is one noticeable scratch in this record:
the repeated words “please You.”
The weight that’s given to pleasing You
conjures up images of
having to sit still to please my teacher,
tidying my room to please my mother,
pleasing my father by not needing him,
pleasing others so they’ll like me.
Speaking frankly, as one friend to another,
I’m done with wanting to please anyone,
including You.
I sit in the silence and think of Thomas Merton
who taught me that God desires me
to become more and more who I already am,
know deep within my being
I’m loved,
I’m enough,
that God is within me,
connecting me to everyone and everything,
enabling me to love, and
opening me to moments
when I, too, stand at a street corner
suddenly overwhelmed with the realization
that I love all these people,
I love the trees, birds and clouds.
Then You speak to me gently, as one friend to another.
I hear that this desire not to please you
does, in fact, please You.
You don’t mind
that I can’t sit still or
haven’t made my bed.
It pleases you to come near
when I need
a father or a friend.
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. —Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
