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The other day Eve Tushnet summed up most of the last eight years of my life in one pithy sentence: “The sacrifice you want to make for God may not be the sacrifice He wants from you."

I sometimes face temptations to despair. The latest round sprung from an overreaction to an off-hand remark on a website much more popular than this blog. (I’m confident that author doesn’t read this site.) One priest of my acquaintance speaks often of experiencing God’s love in unexpected moments – often moments having to do with the beauty of nature. Saturday morning I had such a moment, hiking through ankle-deep powder snow under a cloudless sky amid stillness and quiet. Surely God would not tease me with such indescribable beauty if I were predestined to wrath. Such beauty – and more - may be mine again, despite the fact that I clearly don’t deserve it, so long as I accept the grace to enter by the narrow gate.

Despair's a particularly nasty bugger as it can dispose one to give in to other temptations that he might otherwise resist.

In Te, Domine, speravi; non confundar in aeternum!