Advent Advent III.ii

I read this early this morning, in a daily-delivered email that I usually delete:

Our practice of contemplation is not the avoiding of “distractions,” as was foolishly taught, but instead we use them “to look over their shoulder” for God! This was the brilliant insight of the author of the fourteenth-century book, The Cloud of Unknowing (Chapter 32). The persistence of the distraction can actually have the effect of steadying your gaze, deepening your decision, increasing your freedom, your choice, and your desire for God and for grace—over this or that passing phenomenon. The same can be true with any persistent temptation.
The “shoulders” of the distraction almost become your necessary vantage point and they create the crosshairs of your seeing. Who would have thought? It is an ideal example of how God uses everything to bring us to God. (...)
It is not the avoidance of problems that makes you a contemplative, but a daily holding of the problem, straight on (while not letting it hold onto you)—and finding a resolution in the much deeper and more spacious “peace of Christ, which will guard your heart and your mind” (Philippians 4:7). I never knew it would take such hourly vigilance to guard my heart and my mind from anger, judgment, fear, jealousy, and negativity of any kind. Only the vast peace of Christ can do it.  

Adapted from Contemplation in Action, p. 18, Richard Rohr

As I went through today's readings (Obadiah? yesterday Nahum? I truly did not even know these were in our Bible and wondered if I had accidently tripped across a Catholic site... Sunday School fail), I found myself alternately thinking of other people for whom these particular words would be more useful and how I would arrange childcare and pay some of our bills. As the Psalmist waits and waits and waits for God to deliver him from life's Too Hard and the prophets promise justice and Peter exhorts the early church to hang in there together and Matthew tells the story of Jesus using camels and needles to illustrate how impossible it is to live in the Kingdom of Heaven but promising that it is the very impossibility of it all that is what is made possible by the Creator... as all that happens, I have to look over the shoulders of my own Too Hard and the enormous eye of the needle in front of me and let them deepen my desire for Grace, let them be the crosshairs of what I'm seeing. A God who does not abandon us to the Too Hard, a God not flummoxed by my holding on to too much.

This metaphor or image or whatever it is is helping me so much this morning.

What happens when you look over the shoulders of what's distracting you?

Matthew 19:23-26

New International Version (NIV)

²³ Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴ Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
²⁵ When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”
²⁶ Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”