Daily Meditation for May 24, 2024

In his song “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen urges his listeners to forget the futile, paralyzing quest for perfection. “Forget the perfect offering,” he writes, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Let’s remember that at creation, God didn’t say of this teeming universe, “It’s perfect.” God said, “It’s good,” even though lilies fade, stars burn to ash, butterflies and songbirds flourish and then go extinct, and humans, the most imperfect of all creatures, continue to hurt themselves and each other in ways too numerous to tally. Still, our sustaining God continues to say, “It’s good.” What’s good enough for God is good enough for us humans. One of our biggest challenges, then, is to go out into the weed-friendly fields and open our eyes to the light of hope, perseverance, and love that streams into our world, in all its cracked and marred beauty, and into our lives, each of us broken, imperfect—and infinitely precious.

By Mara Faulkner, OSB