This is the time of the liturgical colour blue, the colour of the night sky. But it is almost the colour of pure celebration. You can see it, white and gold, approaching through the spare and longing branches.
All during the last four Advent weeks, those who approach Christmas as a holy opening have been preparing our hearts, waiting, anticipating, caught on an in breath. Continue reading “The Moment Just Before”
Coming to this all hallows evening we hear the call to pay attention to the permeable fabric of time. It is a potent time in which those others who have lived before and will live after crowd with us onto the stage of our life. It is good to pay attention. We are put in perspective by the great crowd of witnesses that assemble. It is both humbling and comforting to welcome them.
Who might show up at the door of our life this evening, this sundown that ushers in All Saints? Perhaps one of the church fathers or the desert mothers, perhaps our great aunt with her arms full of washing fresh from the sunlit line, perhaps the child of our grand child, coming to us arms outstretched holding the quiet gift of the future.
Perhaps we will open a door to one we have yet to forgive or one we never knew had forgiven us. Perhaps it will be someone we are now able to thank. Perhaps it will be to love. All of us, great or glamorous, famous or little noticed are much the same size this evening. We are, as that hymn says, in the line I love so much, “small paper lanterns lighting the way”. That is enough.
I hope you open the door of your heart in these days to a bevy of small paper lanterns, a small bright cloud of witnesses and that you know yourself, one of them, lighting the way
A wise woman gave me a question. “What would it look like in this moment to take one small step in the direction of Love?” It wasn’t an asked question. It was truly given. I carry it with me in the place that is the last to close up in fear or anger, in fatigue or frustration, in the pressure of near impossible
choices, in the moment when I have nearly lost myself. Continue reading “The Gift of a Question”
It is the first day of May but it is not yet spring. Somehow a picture of a flower or a blue sky or a bright bird felt unhinged from the tenor of the day. So, I remembered this, the surprise of these colours on the pew of a staid, old church.
The warm flush of this unasked for gift comes back to me on this shallow day of small plans and unfinished stories. It reminds me of how I am hosted in the world. Continue reading “The Welcome Seat”
Many things continue to amaze me. How the tiniest thing can lift your heart; one bird’s song just before the day fades, or the sun like a tired mother leading her rain child away.
And how a time of morning prayer, seemingly stolen by inner chaos and distraction, later in the day can open a moment as though you had bowed before it. Continue reading “Amazed”
The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about texture; especially the texture of joy. Perhaps I could have chosen a more vivid image, but I am writing about joy from the inside of fatigue. I was feeling fatigue as a weight and then I imagined what it would be like to just go inside it; not give into it, but enter it. This is what joy looks like there; not edgy, but blue, and gold with tiny cloud birds flying softly through it. Continue reading “The Texture of Joy”
Everything is waiting for you . . .
Poet David Whyte’s words seemed to just emerge from behind this sky as I watched it, unrolled like a bolt of soft silk on the cutting table; its possibility growing with each thumping turn of the cardboard spool, soft piles of abundance massing. Where will we take it; where will it take us, all that is waiting.
Continue reading “A Morning to Share”
