Thursday Dec 07

In the midst of darkness, in times of great weariness, whether of personal despair or despair over our troubled world, there is light and hope. Our trust is in the Lord, our portion, and His unfathomable love for us. We turn to Him in trouble. We wait for Him. We hope in Him.

My father lived this truth every day in the years that I knew him, and was a constant beacon of the light of God for all he encountered. Papa Paul gave me many gifts, but the greatest were those shared by his example. He demonstrated how to embrace life and focus on joy. Later, when he came to live with us, I noticed how quickly he would tell even new acquaintances of the Lord’s goodness. He would say, “the Lord’s been so good to me.” The Lord truly was “his portion;” throughout his years he continually sought God, learned to wait on Him, and placed all hope in Him.

The most beautiful gift I received from my dad was the knowledge that nothing can separate us from God. In the throes of Alzheimer’s disease, his spiritual being remained strong until the end. Whenever he became anxious or agitated, he would loudly whisper “Jesus.” His breathing would slow and deepen as peace poured into him. When words began to fail, “Jesus” was still always on his tongue. I watched as the Holy Spirit kept him company in ways I could not fully fathom, and my father and I began to connect and communicate in other, remarkable ways as he continued to live fully even though his life on earth was coming to an end. Weeks after he passed I found a lasting reminder of how he lived, tucked away in his wallet’s deepest recesses. Folded and yellowed, I saw his hand-written words of Psalm 90:10, 12.

Years later, I came across this poem by St. Thomas Aquinas, a beautiful reminder that my father had shared with us the greatest truth of his life: that he knew, in the deepest sense of understanding and experiencing, the pulse of God.

“The Pulse of God”

The limbs of a tree reached down and lifted me,
thinking I was its
child.

And in the meadows my spirit becomes so quiet
that if I put my cheek against the earth’s body
I feel the pulse of God.

“Tell me the way you do that, birds—
enter the private chambers of my Lord.”

And they all sang,
they just
sang.

I gathered it was time to become a musician,
and I did.

Years passed,
and the sky reached down one day and lifted me:
the birds noticed and spoke,

“How do you enter the Sun like that
and know the pulse of God?”

Papa Paul “just sang” all the days that I knew him, embracing the pulse of God. As we experience this Advent season, a time of reflection and waiting and hope, can you sing of the Lord as your portion?

Where have you felt the pulse of God?