Some things just take awhile. I might wait for the roses to bloom each summer. Or for the sun to rise. Or for a birthday. Or for a bird to appear at the feeder. This is expectant waiting. But it depends on an awareness of durative time.
I have a friend who often quotes a saying from Twelve Step Recovery programs, “Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. This sounds like very ancient wisdom, far older than AA.
These are things I want to see. Resurrection. Rejoicing. Enemies turned away and oppressors dealt with. The lame and outcast secure and respected. Homecoming. Fortune restored.
This is the second of a two-part article. By Donald Schell From coffee at North Rim Lodge at 5 we took the shuttle to the
Why had this journey mattered so much? I knew from walking the Santiago pilgrimage across Spain what a wonder it would be to stare back across the Grand Canyon and remember beginning at the far edge thirty-six hours before. And I knew that walking a long distance and watching the horizon change one step touches archetypal human memories.
The other day Jim, my husband, said, “I don’t know where home is anymore.” We are continuing the process of selling our home of over 30 years where we raised our three children. We have a home to move to but are in transition, still spending time in one place, keeping it up and tidy for prospective buyers. Often when we wake up in the night we can’t remember where we are.
What changes our mind is our heart, not argument. The experience of knowing people changes our mind.
Anyone who is invited to give talks or public addresses or lectures or workshops knows that one will encounter complete strangers as well as a few old friends. The nature of these chance meetings varies widely but, given that I speak about biblical matters, the possibility of deeply meaningful interactions is always present.
But grief and pain are not burdens you get to put down before they have lived out their life in you. Not-knowing was the shoes I walked in; solitude was the path itself. There may be distraction in this life, but there is ultimately not escape, and on the Camino there was not even much distraction.
I’d visited Joe in the hospital several times before he fell into the coma. The cancer was taking him quickly. Joe had co-chaired the parish search committee that had taken the big risk of calling me, a divorced twenty-nine year old priest from across the country, to be their rector. It hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped, I guess.