This week we return to Ordinary Time, the season of growth, and one thing’s for sure: real growth is a slow process, requiring patience and trust. With that in mind, MMOC Contemplative Core Team member Joy Kleucker offers the following selection from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.

Yet it is the law of all progress, that it is made by passing through some stages of instability, and that may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.

Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace- and circumstances
acting on your own good will) will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new Spirit gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God, our loving vine-dresser.