Regis Martin - Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God

Regis Martin is a sage for our time. Here he offers us wisdom for confronting the greatest mystery of life: suffering and death. Yet he does so with real grace and poetic wit. Divine truth joined to the practical challenges of human life; thats what we all need, and what Martin offers in abundance. Along with profound insights, you will find encouragement and hope, coming from the God of mercy through the cross of Christ.

Scott Hahn

Author of The Lambs Supper

Regis Martin leads the reader to confront some of the great mysteries of our existence, reflecting on life and death, hope and despair, as well as the anxieties and the perplexity we feel about the unknowns to come and the unknowns with which we engage regularly. He shares concrete examples, many from his own life, but also those from great minds who explore questions which both they and we must face. All of this is done in a context of our faith.

Most Reverend John J. Myers

Archbishop of Newark

Regis Martin has a campus-wide reputation for a remarkable vocabulary, punctuating lectures with apt quotes from poets, theologians, and the occasional rock star, and unflinchingly exploring the real problems of suffering, evil, and death. This lovely book shows his reputation is well deserved as he wrestles with deep human longings and offers us the hope of Christ: O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?

Rev. Terrence Henry, T.O.R.

President

Franciscan University of Steubenville

With the eloquence and poignancy of a poet, Regis Martin gets to the heart of lifes most urgent questions, forging a link between our desperate desires and our homesickness for God in this profound and beautiful book.

Rev. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

Editor-in-Chief, Magnificat

Regis Martin is one of Catholicisms trustworthy guides to the spiritual life in all its dimensionsincluding, as he demonstrates here, its hard and challenging dimensions.

George Weigel

Distinguished Senior Fellow

Ethics and Public Policy Center

Regis Martins moving reflection on our death-haunted and restless search for God is both beautiful and bracing. Drawing on the profound imaginings of our poets and our theologians, Martins meditation takes place on the lip of the abyss as he shows us who it is our hearts so restlessly long for.

Gregory Erlandson

President

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing

Regis Martin probes the deepest wounds we sufferloss and longingand presents us with our hope for healing: while we ache, we are alive with longing. This book is as haunting and hypnotic as the poetry on which it depends. Martin applies the poetry of the transcendent as a balm, the first dose in the course of a cure. You will not forget the stories he tells you. His reading of familiar biblical passages will not fail to move you and shake you.

Mike Aquilina

Author of Why Me?: When Bad Things Happen

This book beautifully proclaims the Gospel in a unique and deeply poetic manner. Drawing on poetry, philosophy, theology, and the depths of human experience, Regis Martin lyrically connects the deepest longings and hopes of the human heart with their overwhelmingly generous fulfillment in Christ. This book can only increase our own desperate desire for eternal love and fulfillment and deepen our hope in its certain coming to pass.

Ralph Martin

Director of Graduate Theology Programs in the New Evangelization

Sacred Heart Major Seminary

Regis Martin is a masterful writer who, with wit and charm, draws the reader into a dialogue with some of the greatest thinkers and writers of human historyto ask the questions that lie deep within each persons heart. This is a breathtakingly beautiful book that will stir within any reader a longing to deepen their personal relationship with the Person of Jesus Christ.

Mike Sullivan

President

Catholics United for the Faith

Regis Martin not only knows and loves the truth, he expounds upon it beautifully. Still Point is a captivating look at the most perplexing and unavoidable aspects of lifes voyage. Overwhelmed by desperate desires, which appear to go unnoticed, and then unsatisfied, we are led to see that, in the end, love will find a way.

Curtis Martin

President and Founder

Fellowship of Catholic University Students

The Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1965, 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Revised Standard Version Bible, Apocrypha, copyright 1957; The Third and Fourth Books of the Maccabees and Psalm 151, copyright 1977 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments continued on page 95.

____________________________________

2012 by Regis Martin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Ave Maria Press, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556.

Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

www.avemariapress.com

Paperback:

ISBN-10 1-59471-341-3

ISBN-13 978-1-59471-341-5

E-book:

ISBN-10 1-59471-358-8

ISBN-13 978-1-59471-358-3

Cover image Don Paulson Photography/Purestock/SuperStock.

Cover and text design by Andy Wagoner.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Martin, Regis, 1946-

Still point : loss, longing, and our search for God / Regis Martin.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59471-341-5 (pbk.) -- ISBN 1-59471-341-3 (pbk.)

1. Hope--Religious aspects--Catholic Church. I. Title.

BV4638.M385 2012

234.25--dc23

2012022134

In memory of my father...

Regis E. Martin Sr.

19192011

Is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each mans relentless longing becomes a god to him?

Virgil, Aeneid

The very existence of the question implies the existence of an answer.

Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Where is God? Where is God now?

Elie Wiesel, Night

At the still point of the turning world.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Contents

The state of being lostwhat does it mean? We all want to go home: J. Cheever vignette. The fear of death and the dread of what may come after. M. Unamuno and the tragic sense of life . Finding the still point , and thus God, in the midst of desolation and death. Introducing the theme of hope and the argument of the book.

A mothers death... an unread book... the Holocaust of the Jews... the strangled cry from the Cross... the Mystery of Holy Saturday. What do these have in common? Establishing the truth that God is love: the strongest argument of all (JPII). Gods radical solidarity in a world too often resistant to his Suffering Servant.

How to cross an infinite sea on a finite bridge: C. S. Lewis and A Grief Observed . What if God does not want us after all? The bastion of hope and those who assault it: J. Didion and The Year of Magical Thinking . Aquinas, Eros, and the human longing to see the beloved. The horror of an everlasting nonfulfillment.

Going in search of the lost: the lesson of Orpheus and Eurydice. What do we really want? The ground of desire and the anguish of never getting it. The answer is eschatology. Canvassing the mystery of the End and the need for hope. Peguys tiny girl, who gets up each morning. Everything is grace (St. Th r se).