For the next 6 weeks or so I’ll be teaching a seminary course I call “Contemplative Writing.” This year’s run coincides almost exactly with the season of Lent. It teaches a discipline that can help us “word-people” – teachers, preachers, bloggers — to let our words take us beyond words, and center our lives more fully in God.
As I put down the kitchen phone, I remember with a pang how, when my kids were small, they would greet a day like this with great whoops of joy, running outside to sled down the lawn and make snow angels. Don’t look back, I tell myself. Banish the self-pity. You have two healthy, grown kids. You have a full life, people and work you love. You’re safe in a warm house. To be anything but thankful would be a disgrace. Still…
Most of us are untrained for emergencies. Lacking experience, we’re unfamiliar and uncomfortable with tragedy – not others, not our own. It’s awkward when tragedy strikes a friend. We’re not sure how to be present. We keep our distance. We look on from a safe place. We read the paper: “Whew. What a relief this happened to someone else.”
In this new year, how I wish that we Episcopalians could focus on the gifts so freely and lavishly given to each of us by God: our capacity to love and our freedom to commit ourselves to whomever we choose; the thousands of opportunities available to serve those without a voice in our society and in the wider world.
On the third hellish day, as I struggled unsuccessfully to hold down liquids, I decided to envision each person who walked through my door as God the Father or God the Son bringing the Holy Spirit. After this resolve, the second person to arrive was a nurse named Jesus!
I put the old glass ornaments up high, but obviously not high enough. As I heard the smash of glass scattering into the mix of fir needles and dust bunnies, I thought, “Ahhh – now it is Christmas.” Sweeping up the fuchsia colored shards and needles so we don’t have to give the vacuum cleaner hose one more tracheotomy, I found that I had come to a new place about Christmas.
We are brought up to believe that if we’re good boys and girls, we’ll get everything on our Christmas list. Most of us recognize, by the time we reach adulthood, that life doesn’t add up that way. “Wonderful” people, we discover, experience suffering, disappointment, and loss. There are “wonderful” people all over the world who go to bed hungry and have no roof at all over their heads.
I didn’t meet my first girlfriend on a church pew, but it was kind of similar. The church youth group went on a field trip and we were crowded together in the backseat of the youth leader’s car. I doubt that I would have had the courage to ask her, or anyone, to the Senior Prom if it hadn’t been for that incident.
Annabella Santos-Wisniewski stood on her favorite Boracay Island beach in her native Philippines and had a vision. Looking behind her into a forest of palm trees, she said, “I see something white like a jewel sparkling at night. It connects inside and out to the environment such that nature is inseparable from the whole.”
Look for your mother of old. This is one of the deep stories of humanity—an archetype coded deep in our understanding that resonates at a subconscious, an unconscious, level. Look for your mother of old. And, lifting my eyes from my armchair Aeneid, I find it again in books dotting my shelves—from Asimov’s Foundation series to the Holy Scriptures themselves.