Finding grace, faith and love in loneliness

I started writing this post several days ago on the subject of loneliness: a feeling that friends and family here have already moved on to a place that accepts and supports the idea of Mary in Tanzania and the absence of her physical body here, (even now!) as one to hang out with, connect with, and grow with.  Meanwhile, here I am still, waiting and reflecting and navigating pseudo-friendships made with newly acquainted co-workers whom I'll be ditching in just a few weeks when I stop working to spend more time with my family. It's a loneliness often comprised of feeling incomplete, impatient and downright sad about not knowing the plan of how all of the relationships with my closest friends will evolve.

Then, I recently had a conversation about receiving grace and thought I would change my post to that since the preceding paragraph seemed unsubstantial for the topic of 'witnessing faith'. What exactly is grace, you (hypothetically) ask? According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church- a resource which has been described to me as “in many ways, a greater necessity to read than the Bible,” (though, this is the first time since my 8^th grade Confirmation that I have used it)- grace is a participation in the life of God, otherwise defined as God's life within us. Grace, however, escapes our human experience; we cannot rely on our feelings or our works to know that we have received grace; we must rely on our faith.
     I experience faith as the 'letting go' of expectations, judgments and ideals to embrace our inner calling, the most relevant calling being the one to serve with JVC and leave our friends and family for two years.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes about faith in Buddhism and Christian practices in Living Buddha, Living Christ, emphasizing how we can practice faith:

Our faith must be alive, always growing, like a tree. It is our true religious experience that nourishes our faith and allows it to grow....For genuine awakening to be possible, we must let go of notions and concepts about nirvana, and about God. We must let go not just of our notions and concepts about the ultimate but also of our notions and concepts about things in the phenomenal realm. In Buddhist practice, we contemplate impermanence, non-self, emptiness, and interbeing to help us touch the phenomenal world more deeply, release our notions and concepts about things, and penetrate the heart of reality.

One way for faith to grow is through prayer, and the source of prayer is love. Back to the Catechism I found myself, reading on how a church filled with love is encouraged:

If the church was a body, it must have a Heart, and a Heart burning with LOVE...LOVE, IN FACT, IS THE VOCATION WHICH INCLUDES ALL OTHERS; IT'S A UNIVERSE OF ITS OWN, COMPRISING ALL TIME AND SPACE-IT'S ETERNAL! (caps copied from the text)

I didn't major in theology, or philosophy, or physics for that matter, so contemplating this universe of love that seems to collide with the phenomenal world that Thich Nhat Hanh writes about, is a daunting, then exhausting process. But, I've come to believe that God's love is the love being contemplated, and God's love comprises the grace that each of us are gifted with as we grow in our faith.

Just when I thought I could wrap up this rabbit-hole-of-a-post, I stumbled upon an article on love by Fr. Brendan Busse, S.J.,titled: Remain in Love: To Live Without Leaving.  Fr. Busse reflects on the the feelings of leaving; how leaving “feels like a sickness, like a pit in the stomach or an ache in my heart.” He goes on to say, “The complementarity of our temporal being and Love's eternal becoming is our only hope. Stay in my love and my love will stay in you.”
     Remember Jimmy's presentation about Pedro Arrupe? [Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.] When we are feeling lonely, struggling with unsure good-byes and passing through this time of transition with diplomatic, programmed responses to questions and comments that may harbor feelings of impatience, incompleteness and sadness as we anticipate the difficult good-byes still to come, we can be sure that we have love- love for those we are leaving, love for God, and above all, God's love in and with us throughout it all.

Fr. Busse concludes with:

I read once in a synagogue prayer book that, “We hate leaving, but God loves becoming.” To live without leaving is simply to remain in love’s becoming. To remain in this place is to know that nothing can come between us, and that love alone will fill the space of our longing. So when our heart aches and our friends are gone we do the only thing we ever ought to do – we remain in love.

So, I guess my original idea for this post related to the JVC pillar after all: this time of leaving can be opportune for witnessing faith by witnessing the love of God we find in our becoming as we grow in grace during times of loneliness.
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I hope you find the time to read the article by Fr. Busse! I found it very thought-provoking and would love to hear your reflections on it, or anything in this post for that matter.