June 13, 2012
Today I am beginning to write. It is not as though I have never written; I have been writing for decades. But today is different.
Hanna and I are beginning our second quarter quiet week at Santa Rita Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in the high desert of southeastern Arizona. We have been coming here for more than ten years. These quiet weeks—retreats allowing us to more fully concentrate on being with God—have become our lifeline.
What do I mean by saying, “Today I am beginning to write”? I am not sure. What is it that has brought me to this point, whatever it may be?
1 – Younger people in my life are asking me to write. Some of them tell me that I have become a spiritual father to them. What does an aging father owe his children, and others who come behind him?
The words of the psalmist come almost daily to my inner person: So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.—Psalm 71:18
2 – The sense that I have an assignment from my Father to assemble my life teaching. This understanding first coalesced almost seven years ago on a visit to Baltimore. Hanna and I had a dear friend, Maureen Donohue (she has since been taken by Jesus to live more fully in His Presence), who spoke wise and insightful words to me just following the occasion of my 65th birthday. “George, I sense with you turning 65 you are entering a new life stage that calls for life adjustments. You are to bring together your life teaching, and make it available to the generations who follow you.”
I have been teaching and writing for decades. Has God entrusted to me anything of value? Time will tell.
3 – I feel a great weight of having so much that I want to say… have been given to say… but have few opportunities to say. Living in the discipline of silence over these last years has been absolutely priceless in terms of the development of my own soul. From age 25 to 45 I was preaching and teaching multiple times a week. Is God restricting my opportunities to teach to force what is inside me to come out via the written page?
4 – I am writing because I have to write. If others find anything of value in these pages, to God alone be the glory.
