Regina Pacis, the house where I live with five of my brother priests, almost three km. from the main compound of Madonna House, is indeed built on a small dry spot of earth surrounded by miles and miles of wetlands.

A small stream skirting the edge of our property normally provides adequate drainage, although a constant job in the spring and fall is "beaver patrol"—breaking up those persistent Canadian mascots’ annoying efforts to dam the stream and flood us out.

This winter, however, due to complex factors I do not fully understand (see last month’s article, "Einstein I Ain’t"), the stream completely froze up, creating a formidable ice dam. However, the stream of water draining into our property did not completely freeze up.

No, it kept coming… and coming… and coming. Lots of water. A swampful of it!

We have, deo gratias, a rather large back yard with an even larger field behind it. This field became a frozen lake, vast to behold, and growing larger and higher by the day. No, make that by the hour. You could see it moving, almost.

"A slow motion tsunami," Fr. Kieran called it. "Should we start building an ark?" I asked.

I live in a swamp, but not until this year has the swamp come a-callin’ quite so insistently. Oh, by the time this issue of Restoration is in your hands, spring will have long arrived, and unless you’ve read a news story about six priests in Ontario being swept away by a flood, we probably will have survived OK. Thank God for sump pumps!

So, has the swamp come a-callin’ at your house lately? Oh, you know what I mean. Three thousand years ago the psalmist prayed, Save me, O God, for the waters have risen to my neck. I have sunk into the mud of the deep, and there is no foothold…" (Ps 69:1-2). Have you felt like that lately?

We all live in a swamp, really. That is, we all live surrounded by forces that are bigger than we are. We carve out a tidy little space of order and control in a vast "wetland" that may seem benign and non-threatening much of the time, but certainly is not taking its marching orders from us.

We are creatures—swamp creatures, if you will—and we live out our lives nestled in a vast world of powerful forces that ebb and flow, well up and die down, seemingly without reference to us. We are not the center of the universe. We are not in control.

When the waters started pouring into the backfield of the priests’ house, and the general swampiness of life encroached upon us, there wasn’t too much we could do. It was bigger and stronger than we were.

Likewise when the "flood waters" come surging into our lives, there’s sometimes (often?) not much we can do about it either. No foothold, no time, no ability to regroup, to gain perspective, to come up with some clever strategy: I have entered the waters of the deep, and the waves overwhelm me (Ps 69:2).

Swamped! And whomped! Whether by illness, or economic crisis, or some larger global/political crisis, or by some grievous tragedy of loss and sorrow, it happens to each of us sooner or later, often or seldom.

And then there’s the daily swampiness: overwork, heavy burdens, unsolvable problems. Life is so often just a little more than we can handle. Them waters just keep coming at us. Today the backfield, tomorrow maybe the back yard, and before you know it, your basement is flooded. Before you know it, your life is, once again, swamped.

What to do? The psalmist knows. It’s at times like this that the psalms really come into their own. Those anonymous poets who composed the psalms seem to have "lived in a swamp," too. Certainly, they lived life utterly overwhelmed, lives determined by the forces of history, war, oppression, poverty, as so many billions of people live today in so much of the world.

And they show us what to do, the only thing (really) there is to do: they cried out to the Lord. In their distress, in their fear, in their pain, as the waters lapped around their necks, they cried out. This is my prayer to you, my prayer for your favor. In your great love, answer me, O God, with your help that never fails: rescue me from sinking into the mud; save me from my foes (Ps 69:13-14).

Not a vain, last-ditch effort to wrest control of the universe back to ourselves, making God fix things the way we like them, not a forlorn "whistling in the dark" to convince ourselves that there really is someone out there noticing us as we go under, not a final despairing acquiescence to the waves, lapsing into fatalistic submission.

No! Crying out is, in its deepest expression, an act of faith that even in the flood, even as the mighty waters crash into our carefully ordered lives, our houses, our hearts, there is a Master, a Lord, who sits enthroned over the flood. The Lord sits as king forever (Ps 29:10).

Crying out is asserting that, no matter what, no matter what level of tragedy, pain, defeat, chaos may engulf our lives, there is a God, there is a Love that is stronger, a Life that is deeper, a better home, a Heart, a rock upon which we can stand. No matter what!

It is to know that, even—and perhaps especially—if we drown, our lives, our loves, our homes, our hearts, are in the keeping of one who loves us and who rules the world. Our lives are in the keeping of the Holy One of Israel (Ps 89:18). And this is enough.