Have Known You So Late!
4 August 2005, 6 pm | Reflection
Maybe it was because it took me nearly forty years to finally come to faith (I joke that I am a little slow, kind of like the Israelites, because it took us forty years while it only took Jesus forty days!), or more likely that I manage on a good day to be open to only a small fraction of God’s grace that rains down around me, but the first paragraph of today’s meditation in the Magnificat caused a flood of tears:
At the moment when the mother of Saint Alexis recognized her son in the lifeless body of the beggar who had lived for thirty years under her palace stairway, she cried out, “O my son! that I should have known you so late!…” The soul, at the end of this life, will see at last him whom it possessed in the Eucharist; and, at sight of the consolations, the beauties, the riches that it has disregarded, it too, will cry out: “O Jesus, my Life, my Treasure, my Love, to think that I should have known you so late!…”
— St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars
But I am consoled to know that be it forty or even eighty years without, that is near to nothing compared to eternity with.
Lord, if I am not within your grace, please put me there. If I am within your grace, please keep me there.
![[image: 'Smiling Jesus']](http://journal.cowpi.com/grafiks/sidebar/smiling-jesus2.jpg "'Smiling Jesus'")
![[Jerusalem Cross with Heart]](http://cowpi.com/journal/grafiks/jerusalem-cross-heart.gif "Jerusalem Cross with Heart")
Comments
While we so often awake to regret we did not find Him until so late in our life, I’ve always thought it even sadder the word spoken by Jesus unto Phillip: “Have I been with you so long a time and you do not know me?”………..
∼ πλ · 6 August 2005, 7 am · by Jim ¬
Back again, Mark. Just returned from another short trip to Florida and am “catching up”. Don’t know who (I assume you) wrote the story about the van, but what a beautiful reflection on the journey we take. So much in so little. The Bible may be much of the foundation beneath us, but it is little bits of manna like this that can also speak to our souls……
∼ πλ · 6 August 2005, 7 am · by Jim ¬
Jim, your scripture quote about not knowing Jesus spells out perfectly one of the deeper dimensions to the original quote. God is already here, all around us, but we often cannot see him, and there in lies the frustration, sorrow, and eventually joy.
Yes, I wrote the story about the van, “The Passenger”. It was a rare moment of inspiration for me. Most of it, in a less polished form, kind of came in a daydream after meditating on Matthew 14:22-36.
∼ πλ · 6 August 2005, 9 am · by Mark ¬
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