Senselessness

It's a little difficult to remain faithful to this blog, especially since its public nature doesn't let me reveal as much about myself and also because (ok a little human pride here) I know no one reads it!

I started reading Maurice and Thérèse, a book about the series of letters written back and forth between Thérèse of Lisieux (a Carmelite French nun and later, saint) and Maurice, a long forgotten missionary seminarian of the time who had been struggling with many spiritual issues.

I have to admit Maurice doesn't sound someone I would like very much, but I'm not sure if it's because of the dramatically pious 19th Century language he uses, because he reminds me of some seminarians I see today, or maybe [worse!] because there are parts of him that remind me of myself.

It's just very interesting to see how it contrasts with Thérèse's maturity by that point, even she herself was struggling with physical ailment (tuberculosis) and the doubts of atheism.

I don't think the admission of atheism or doubt by part of religious figures is troubling. Instead, I feel it's comforting because for me it makes these people more real and authentic than the flat sometimes sugar coated hagiography in the books I've read about saints since being a little kid.

Recently I lost a little cousin (more specifically, my cousin's young child) to a tragic weather accident (an immediately fatal lightning strike). On the one hand, my mother says his burial was like his sending off into his homecoming in heaven, on the other hand, I feel like "who am I to ask anything of God and expect it if other things like these happen?" What are my mundane pleas but nothingness?

If he really is up in a heaven that exists, I wonder if he understands what Julian meant when she once said (and I remembered today, when battling with sense versus random senselessness) that "love was His meaning." Although I don't understand, it's enough of a statement to resist the temptation of thinking this is all just chaos.