Wise Pathways

"Stand beside the earliest roads,

   ask the pathways of old

Which is the way to good, and walk it;

   thus you will have rest for your souls."

                                               - Jeremiah 6:16

Rest for the soul is not to be sought after lightly. It is to be searched for relentlessly,

hounded and tracked. To live without it is not really living. It is a getting-by, a surviving

but never really a thriving. To truly live, it is necessary to have rest for your soul, to have

healthy spiritual repose. We’re not talking about Piña Coladas and Jacuzzis here. This is

a rest that finds us in the depths of our beings. It is a drinking of living water (Jn 4:10), a

reclining on the breast of the Lord (Jn 13:23).

“Come to me,” says the Lord, “all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you

rest” (Mt. 11:28). Jesus is the way to good of which Jeremiah speaks. This is what the

earliest roads would tell us; this is what the pathways of old would say to us, because

Jesus is the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. He is the Alpha and the

Omega (Rev 1:17, 21:6). He was there for the laying of the foundations of the world; he

has entered into the springs of the sea and walked in the recesses of the deep; he knows

the storehouses of snow and hail or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth (see

Job 38). He was in the beginning with God and he was God and now he has pitched his

tent among us (Jn 1:1,14). And why? He was sent so that your soul may have rest. I

would take him up on the offer.

 

+ Br. Joseph Michael Fino
St. Felix Friary, Yonkers, NY

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