Lectio
“God leads each one along different paths so that hardly one spirit will be found like another in even half its method of procedure.”
— St. John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love
Meditatio
No two lives accumulate the same wounds, the same silences, the same moments of unexpected grace. Our experiences — good and bad, beautiful and tragic, joyous and painful — not only shape who we are, they are God’s unique way of communicating with us individually. They are also the palette by which the divine painting of our lives is formed and offered to others. No two artists are alike, no two paintings are alike, and no two emotional responses to or interpretations of those paintings are exactly alike. Likewise, no two spiritual experiences are exactly alike and, therefore, no two witnesses to the Spirit are exactly alike.
We see this across the whole of the Hebrew scriptures. Abraham’s decades of waiting — the long, silent years between God’s promise and fulfillment of that promise — shape him into a father and a leader who teaches a God of impossible faithfulness, not as instruction but as lived testimony. Moses, formed by exile and displacement, by having belonged fully to neither the world of the enslaved nor the world of the powerful, becomes the great intercessor — the one who stands between, who pleads, who descends from the mountain to meet the people where they are. Jeremiah’s anguish, his reluctance, his unguarded complaints hurled at heaven, forge a prophetic voice that gives Israel permission to grieve, to protest, to bring the full weight of human suffering into the presence of God without the restraint of self-consciousness. David’s losses and failures — his hunger, his guilt, his capacity for both violence and tenderness — produce a poet-king whose psalms become the prayer book for generations of Jews and Christians to follow, because they are unguarded in a way that doctrine, by its nature, cannot afford to be. Each of these men was not simply a messenger. Their wounds, their wanderings, their particular struggles became the very shape of their witness to the God who formed them — each one — for work no one else could do.
The New Testament deepens the pattern. Matthew writes for a community that has lost its temple and needs to know the promise held — so his Christ speaks Torah from the mountain not as one who has studied it but as one who authored it. Mark’s Christ is always already moving, immediately, immediately, pressing toward Jerusalem and the cross, written for people who know what following costs and need to see that he went first. Luke, the outsider, the only Gentile voice in the canon, notices who everyone else walks past — and his Christ stops, touches, tells stories in which the lost are always worth more than the search it takes to bring them home. John writes from the far end of a long life, after everyone else is gone, martyred for their faith, leaving John the last remaining apostle in witness, and his Christ speaks in slow spirals — I am the vine, I am the bread, I am the light — as if only age and loss have earned the patience to circle the mystery without needing to resolve it. These authors’ lives, their unique experiences, perspectives, hopes and fears, became their gospel. And Paul, who never walked with Jesus in the flesh, receives him in blindness on a road to Damascus — and from that single shattering encounter becomes the theologian of the Body, arguing that the eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of you, that the parts which seem weakest are indispensable, that the whole cannot be what it is without each particular member’s contribution.
And so the Church, the body of Christ in the world, in all its diversity of charism and temperament and history, becomes itself a kind of living witness to the prismatic beauty of the Spirit embodied — its own living word, spoken in countless voices. The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of God uttering one eternal Word, one single Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely — and that Word landing differently in every ear, taking root differently in every life, flowering into something the world has never seen before and will never see again. This is not fragmentation. Nothing is discarded. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is lost in God’s economy. Each piece is taken up, held, and completed in something larger than itself. Each life its own complete painting. Together, our lives are a collage whose full design no single piece can see from where it hangs.
The wounds, the silences, the moments of unexpected grace — each one a color no other hand could have mixed, each life a painting the world has never before seen, and will never see again in this exact manifestation.
Oratio
I am but an instrument
for your divine work
here am I Lord
use me to your purpose
my whole life
the joy
the pain
the bliss
the agony
the confusion
somehow
your masterpiece
which I am too close
to see
someday
I will look on it from your side
with a smile
although now
I look from within it
with tears
Contemplatio
Can you trust that nothing in your life — no wound, no wandering, no failure — is wasted within God’s purpose?
Related Scripture
“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” — 1 Corinthians 12:4-7 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like The Tapestry of Life: Finding Joy Through Suffering With St. John of the Cross, which explores how the full range of our experiences — joy and suffering, ease and difficulty — are woven together by God into a rich and mysteriously beautiful life, and how nothing we carry is outside his redeeming work.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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