This Question

The steady stream of masked diminutive persons who came to our door this evening set our son off. At the ring of the doorbell he zoomed to the door to hand the kids candy. Dressed in his Spider Man pajamas, he deposited chocolate truffles (and then when those quickly vanished, Three Musketeers bars) into the kids' bags. He grinned at the kids. Some wanted to hug him. Some scared him. All kept him positively thrilled. The trick or treaters tailed off around 8 PM and after a crazed interlude, he finally fell asleep about an hour ago.

For whatever reason (sugar, Giants win, post-Sounders loss agitation) I also caught the energy bug and can't sleep. I'm combing through my old journals, marveling at the fact that A and I were celebrating our newfound love and carefree college graduations on June 19, 2006, and by June 19, 2009 that love had produced a little person. What we would have said had we known!

I'm also marveling at all the time I had for prayer and people. And how open and entirely exposed that life was to an apophatic love that in my post-law school incarnation I can say I hardly know any more. I'll close with the following excerpt from Thomas Merton, which I think captures the wonder and grace that can come in those exposed, yearning moments of weakness and prayer:

"God my God, God Whom I meet in darkness, with you it is always the same thing! Always the same question that nobody knows how to answer!
"I have prayed to You in the daytime with thoughts and reasons, and in the nighttime You have confronted me, scattering thought and reason. I have explained to you a hundred times my motives for entering the monastery and You have listened and said nothing, and I have turned away and wept with shame.
"Is it true that all my motives have meant nothing? Is it true that all my desires were an illusion?
"While I am asking questions which You do not answer, You ask me a question which is so simple that I cannot answer. I do not even understand the question.
"This night, and every night, it is the same question."

- Thomas Merton, Fire Watch, 1952.