Fr. Simon Sleeman:
Abraham our father in faith. No explanation, no faith definition. But a story, yours and mine, unfolding.
Abraham, called out, leaving, leaving, leaving self-defined confinement, plunging into the larger reality of grace.
Trusting, trusting, trusting in his God. Aligned to his will, obedient direction, one foot moving, then the other.
Tested, tested, tested…fully. Fantasy and foolishness flushed out. His treasure on a donkey.
Hemingway said that, ‘every generation needs a war or its moral equivalent to test it.’
‘We live by forms and patterns’, Wallace Stegner says,‘if the forms are bad we live badly’.
Faith form untested – falters and folds, a kind of ‘wish upwards’, lukewarm, it buckles, the risk of faith too great.
Abraham’s faith-form holds against the odds of sin and sight. Hard travelling faith, set in muscle and bone, sinews and synapses.
Alert to the steering power of spirit… freed. Living by faith – living in grace, a strange thing happens…life.