Spiritual Reading….
Dear God, Father of us all:
When I saw those jigsaw puzzles, it did not occur to me that you had sent them as Spiritual Reading. They were temptations, challenges, distractions. I succumb easily to temptations and distractions. And challenges have always lured me — to happiness or woe.
There was plenty of work calling to me, but I pretended not to hear it, and I sat for hours over those queer jigsaw bits, selecting them one at a time in order to make a beautiful mosaic.
Selecting and rejecting. This fits here. It fits perfectly. But the colors are wrong. Obviously, it does not belong here, whether it fits or not. Ah, here is the piece I want. No. It is the right color, but it does not fit. It almost fits. But it is just as wrong as if it had an entirely different color.
Keep looking. Keep searching. (This is me, Lord, talking to myself.)
There is only one piece in that pile of seven hundred, or a thousand, or a thousand and some. One special piece that fits here and no place else. Rub your eyes. Wipe your glasses. Get a magnifying glass.
Look through all the blue pieces. What you want has to be blue. It has to be a particular shade of blue. And it has to have a thin white line on one end of it — a white line as thin as a hair.
Keep looking. Keep searching. You’ll find it eventually. The needle in the haystack? Easy — if you had a magnet. The magnet here is patience — but a good eye wouldn’t hurt.
Lord, I began to doubt. Suppose the piece I wanted was not there. This was a donation, this puzzle. Other people had sat over it, enjoying it. They had broken it up afterward. And they had sent it that others might enjoy it. Perhaps one had been careless when he put the pieces back in the box. Maybe some pieces fell, were swept up and burnt.
I likened the puzzle to the clothes I wear, the things I eat, the things given me for my use. There was love in the sending of these things, and there is love in accepting them — love for the donors, love for you.
It was in keeping with our way of life in this apostolate that there should be pieces missing. Yet even with pieces missing, the puzzles fascinated me.
Sometimes, in their leisure moments, the girls came in to help me. Sometimes they sat and talked to me.
“Why does God love me?” one asked. “I am nobody, just an ordinary girl. There is not a thing special about me. Absolutely nothing. There isn’t a single thing about me anybody could love. I know God loves me, but why should he?”
Even while I contemplate a jigsaw puzzle, Lord, you are with me, talking to me, talking through me to others.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
“Of course.” Her tone implied that my question was silly, because everybody loved God, even ordinary people.
“God loves the baby just born,” I said, “though it is neither good nor bad.”
“Oh.” The girl tossed that argument aside, and picked up the piece I had been looking for, the very one that had eluded me for hours. She dropped it into place with no feeling of accomplishment. It was as if she had seen a place that needed sweeping and had swept it. “Oh, of course God loves a baby. A baby cannot sin.”
“Neither can it practice virtue,” I said. “God loves every creature he has made. He loves the good, the indifferent, and the bad. He loves those who sin against him. He sent his Son to earth to be a man, to die, to redeem all sinners — especially the worst of them.
“If he loves sinners who do not love him, who may even hate him, how much more does he love those who love him? Especially those like you, who give their whole lives to him?”
“Thanks,” the girl said. “I love him. But I am such a mess! I am glad to realize he loves me. I guess a girl has to be told, every so often, that someone loves her. Imagine though, being lucky enough to be loved by God!”
The jigsaw puzzle became, Lord, not just a temptation or a snare after that. It did indeed become Spiritual Reading, a book of meditations.
Every creature of yours is as complicated as any such puzzle. We are little bits of flesh and bone and color and odd shapes — we are all jigsaw pieces. Some of us are where you want us; where you planned through all eternity that we should be.
Having a free will, though, we can ignore you, God, and go where we don’t belong. We can even fall off your table and be thrown out with the trash.
We do not see the mosaic into which we have been destined to fit. We will see it only when you reveal it to us.
You fit us all together, the living and the dead and the generations not yet born. You play with us continually. You love each piece, the drab as well as the gay, the outside pieces that are distinguished by their straight edges as well as the crazy-shaped bits that are interlocked somewhere in the middle.
You too must find there are some pieces missing — against your will. I wonder if you do not feel more sorrow over that than anyone on earth can realize.
Thank you for the puzzles, Lord. Thanks for placing me where I belong. If you find that I have grown out of the shape you gave me — that I have become warped or bloated — or that the color you gave me has faded through my own fault and no longer entitles me to this particular place — then, God, remove me!
But do not let me fall off your table. Do not let me be swept away from you. Do not permit me to be cast into the fire!
Because, like that girl, I too love you, God.
From I Cover God, The Bruce Publishing Co. 1962
Sketch by Alexander MacAdam
