Tending the Holy
How do we stand in the light in the swift and blinding pain of broken things?
Our instructor stands in front of us. Resolute in his stature, fire crackling in the fireplace behind him, he sighs and looks out the windows overlooking our terrain. Wind is whipping through the Douglas Firs, blowing snow further up and alongside. It’s cold and quiet, barren and clear. The veil that was torn out there and back then shimmers thinly here. He turns and gazes upon us again. His eyes look watery. He’s lived a lot of life, being a retired Jesuit priest. We’re waiting. We’re settling. We’re breathing.
With a breath, he begins.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Prelude One: Beauty
“That I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD.” Psalm 27:4
“There are three preludes to sitting in dark places,” he says. With trepidation and deep hope he speaks with passion and conviction. In his gravelly voice, he continues.
“ We must first appreciate beauty. Look at it everyday until our eyes well up.” I smile as I remember how he began - looking out the windows and then upon us with love. This makes my own eyes well up. I think about how I’ve developed this practice over the last two years, trusting that it matters. Trusting in the goodness of God in the face of war and genocide and famine. In the face of unjust rulers wielding their powers against the vulnerable for the sake of efficiency and their ego. In the face of other’s pain. In the face of my own pain and questions gone unanswered. It’s as if there are two faces we are always presented with: the face of the chronological ticking hand of time, marching ever onwards; and the face of God time - real time - Kairos. Both exist, but only one will last.
Gazing at beauty helps us remain soft and in awe. It helps us remember that we are living in the Grandeur of God as the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins helps open our eyes to exactly how near God is to all of us. The reverberations and echoes from God’s spirit breathing out into the beginning of time seem diminished to reach us all the way out here. Nonetheless, His love still exists, waiting for us to return and rest. For in returning and resting is our salvation as the prophet Isaiah says. Out of the constant returning and resting flows our strength: quiet and confident. Able to stand in chaos. Able to speak truth in love. Able to be at peace among enemies. Some of us have never returned, and need to, for however long it takes, sit with the One who loves us. This is a different sort of strength. This is a quiet strength in yielding to God, before we can even imagine the strength He’ll give us to live as Christ did. We can’t live as Christ if we don’t know how to receive His love.
Beauty can’t save the world, but it sure can help.
Prelude Two: Live in the Light
Our instructor continues with Hopkins -
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
He has asked us to stand in an open prayerful stance.
“For a long time now, before entering centering prayer, I stand at the threshold of my doorway. I settle my feet into the ground, close my eyes, and imagine five feet below me.”
Immediately I picture the earth’s layers - crust, mantle, the liquid outer core and the solid inner core.
“And then I check in with myself. On a scale of one to ten…”
Oh no, I think to myself.
“Without judgement, without shame, I become aware of my desire to be with the One who loves me. Is it at a two? A seven? It doesn’t matter what number it’s at, just become aware of it and ask God to increase your desire by one number.”
At this point, I’m aware of not only myself, but the forty other souls in the room who I’m sure are at a variety of desire to be with God. This gives me comfort, and I think of a past grace or consolation to increase my desire.
“After all,” he says, as if he’s been practicing this for a long time, “grace revisited is grace reactivated.”
Here we are now imagining ourselves in the loving presence of God. Enjoying us. Delighting in us, for He knows us more than we know ourselves. Again, this is a comfort. I feel like I’m floating in an ocean of grace.
He tells us of the first time he sat in a room with a bunch of Evangelicals. “They were so conflicted and obsessed over fixing the darkness.” My eyes well up again. I know this conflict. I know this obsession. I know the yoke that’s slipped over my shoulders that says, “You fix the darkness. There is something terribly wrong with you. What are you going to do about it? If you can fix it, than you can fix it in everybody else too.” Generations have wrung their hands being crushed under this weight. We’ve confessed with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and turned His words into stones cast instead of eating His words as milk and honey and meat - nourishment for our very souls.
It’s not that nothing is wrong. Something is wrong. Who am I letting define me? Let’s have the humility to accept the fact that we don’t get to define who we are. God does.
You are the apple of His eye.
You are His beloved.
You are fearfully and wonderfully made and known.
You are created in the image of God.
The same breath that hovered over the darkness of the deep, breathed into Adam, inhaled life into Eve’s womb, exhaled from the cross, rose back from the depths, ascended into Heaven and descended upon the disciples, is in you and me.
So yes, because of the darkness in me, I know it is everywhere too. And because anything exists at all is because the breath of the Spirit loves it into being.
Friends, how can we sit with others in their pain if we are so focused on what’s wrong? And before we even allow ourselves the tremendous entrustment of someone else’s trust, how can we be honest about our own pain if we don’t know how to let it be seen in the light?
If you don’t believe in the light you can’t stand at the center of pain. We need to sit in His comfort before we can walk in His power, offering comfort to others. Hard and soft, darkness and light. It is all held in the Trinity, and as it turns out, unbeknownst to our pride, nothing can separate us from God’s love.
Just as Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” three times there on the beach in the dawn of His resurrected life, of course Jesus knew Peter loved him. Maybe the real question is, did Peter know?
So we keep our “clock wound” as Madeleine L’Engle puts it in her book, Walking on Water.
“So we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.
We may not always be able to make our ‘clock’ run correctly, but at least we can keep it wound, so that it will not forget.”
Let us not forget who we are. We live in the face of two time zones. One will out last the other, and it’s not the one that’s ticking away worried about when the darkness will close in. It’s the one Who surrendered His breath to His Father in faith, and it returned ten-fold.
Creation. New life.
And now we the Church get to stand solidly in places where kings and queens try to manipulate our breath, and we say if you only knew. My Father and His kingdom are not of this world, but they are for this world. How He loves it so. He invites us to surrender our breath for the sake of the other, trusting that it will return in the fullness of time.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Prelude Three: You are Blessed
I’ll keep this one short. The third prelude to living as light in the darkness is telling yourself the truth. All the time.
God so loved the world first. That is the starting point. Not our sin, not our shame, not our brokenness.
My instructor is a rather healthy enneagram eight. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a healthy eight. I will tell you, this enneagram nine needed to hear his passion and truth. He spoke with such conviction and tenderness I could do nothing but receive the truth, and weep for the joy set before me.
You are worthy of being with Jesus. You are worthy of being loved.
Some people were getting mad because…what about our sin?
What about it?
“It is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord. It is well with my soul.”
Silence.
Breath.
Let the truth settle into your bones, and walk in faith.
Colloquy
I wonder if we’ll always wrestle. I wonder if we’ll always doubt. I wonder too, if we’ll always fall short. I think all this is true. What I also know to be true is that as I’ve scooted my heart over to be filled by the One who loves me, my whole personhood has come alive. At times, all of these emotions are too much, and I freak out a little but that’s ok. I no longer seek to protect my interior peace by controlling everything around me and ignoring my own needs. Instead, I seek to know interior peace first, and as I clash with exterior messiness (we are all in some state of unpacking our boxes), I take a deep breath and know that I will be okay.
Love this, Janell. Here's to keeping things wound!
Beautiful reflections & reminders, thanks to Beautiful God in you, Bill & Gemma, Janell. 💝🌟