Let Us Not Be Put To The Test

RMJ DOES THE BEST ADVENT posts,  I recommend reading them instead of what I was thinking of writing today. 

Since he takes a passage about the last days and hours of Thomas Merton's life as a passage for today, I'll add something he said that goes through my head a lot, these confusing, hard days and hope it's true of us and me. 

A Prayer of Unknowing By Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

OK, I'll add that in meditating on the petitions contained in the Lord's Prayer, the troubling one that is most often translated, "and lead us not into temptation," but which I prefer to say, "let us not fall into temptation," is, in some translations, in English but more often in some other languages, translated as "let us not be put to the test."   These days it seems like we're being put to a test and I feel like I didn't do my homework for pretty much the whole semester.   Out of that, this Advent is being made.