The first line of the first reading from Isaiah 60:1-6 is so instructive for one reading the bloody history of Jerusalem.

“Arise, shine out, Jerusalem, for your light has come.”

The priest at Mass today said “A man with many possessions has many needs.” I was rereading Thomas Merton’s Elected Silence. This passage grabbed my attention in his chapter The Harrowing of Hell, when he is torn by doubts:

“I was in my room. It was night. The light was on. Suddenly it seemed to me that Father, who had been dead for more than a year, was with me. The sense of his presence was as vivid and real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.”

I certainly get these fleeting intense impressions of a loved one. For years you can forget almost the pictures of a dead mother or brother and suddenly they are there, absolutely clear cut and familiar in their features. By what power of some hidden recess of the mind are they conjured up or perhaps they are there? But often their “presence” here is a profound feeling or thought.

Merton continues:

“The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden insight into the misery of my own soul. … And how I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray.”