Processing Soul food

Had you noticed I get frustrated and angry and even a bit cynical, with hackneyed cliches and over-used phrases? Not because they’re wrong; in fact they become hackneyed and over-used precisely because they are (often) true. What gets to me is they’re easy to reach for.

One of those hackneyed and over-used words is “process”. ‘I have to process that thought.’ ‘This information has to be processed slowly.’ It feels often that it is a doing-word that lets us not do.

An image that sprang to mind was a meat grinder or sausage maker: take something big and make it into little pieces then use the little pieces to make something new, preferably with as little waste as possible. Like strawberries becoming jam.

That being said..I am definitely a ‘processing’ person. Sometimes too much. But I have learned two things the hard way: if you don’t process the experience it will come back to choke you and secondly without processing all one does is consume the experince like a PacMan emoji.

So as I have looked at my (overly substantial) weight gain, and reduced energy (or total lack thereof) for mundane house tasks (which is not high to begin with) I have been taken aback by the realization ‘duh: you haven’t taken time to process much of these last 6 months.’

Which surprised me because I have processed so much. The isolation. The remote connecting. Which ironically has allowed me to connect with people I work with (and family) more frequently than I would have in-person. To be vaccinated…or not. Testimony from the #BILM and #MMIGW movements. So what else is there?

Let’s see…The renewed calls to investigate horrors of the Indian Residential School system*, including the reality that almost all of the schools – though government designed and funded– were run by Christian organizations– including my own, which takes pride in its social-justice efforts. That bites.

I learned decades ago that people who look and sound like me were the designer, orchestrators, administrators and staff there. And that, whether I like it or not, I have benefitted from the system that created them. I have confronted myself on what it means – in real terms – that Every Child Matters.

But even knowing that: Choke. Choke. Choke.

Apparently ingesting information is not the same as learning it. The French are correct: savoir is not the same as connaitre. To know information is different thank knowing something ‘in our bones’, at our core, an intimate knowing. One is information, the other is processed information.

Processing takes different forms but, as I see it, they all require 3 things: intention, effort, and focus. And those are hard to sustain, and even harder on our own. But knowing others holding fast too lightens the load.

Processing takes time and effort and discipline. It requires some form of silencing of the mind and being ok with not imposing answers we already have. It needs stilling the body from doing our way through the discomfort of change (the just-keep-busy theory). (Thanks, Christopher Heuertz.)

And I am learning that processing also needs a balance of the difficult and the easy, tears and laughter. There is a Jewish teaching that says it is as important ‘to rejoice with the bride and groom’ as it is to console the bereaved. I have learned to laugh most from my indigenous teachers who remind me “Life is hard so not to laugh as often as we can is to be ungrateful for the joy.” Touche.

It’s hard work to process deep hurt of the stories about Indian Residential Schools.* Real answers are not easy. I can’t accept as sufficient the hackneyed and over-used expressions “We are sorry”, “We must do better “, “I don’t understand how people ( or religious people) could allow that”. To me these simply sound hollow and dismissive. Instead I need to process what I am hearing, and then listen some more. June 30, 2021 is being upheld in Canada as A DAY to LISTEN.

I am glad for the summer to recalibrate. To appreciate the change in demands to process these past months. Push the chair away from the desk, away from my doing-ness, simply to be in the warmth, focus on weeding my wee garden and tending to the deeds of the (not so wee) yard and house. Give my heart some space and solitude, to rest in it all and laugh at the birds and splashing water. And set aside what I know so I can chew it all instead of choke on it, process it rather than simply consuming it.

And, perhaps most importantly, to revel in spending time with other people who share the load, laughing as much as we can, because even if we are masked, at least we won’t be alone. Which just might be what the processing machine needs for its maintenance.

Notes: * I have learned it is important to use the legal name for these institutions. First, it forces us to face the colonialism embedded in what we now understand as as racist: Indian. And second it wasn’t a a ‘residential school’ like boarding school is; because its inherent purpose was to separate children from their family roots and culture to do harm, it needs to be acknowledged as such. (Whether the other kind also does harm is another topic.) ** see also: www.newswire.ca/news-releases or use the iheartradio app. Featured image: ricko.bigcartel.com

roads to the inside

Does your head hurt ‘when the light comes on’ inside? I woke up with a splitting headache and an huge sense of hollowness. Not pleasant. I thought it had something to do with not enough tea (or water) yesterday and being ready for breakfast. It wasn’t…

It was a reaction to processing the idea that we each need profound levels of stillness, solitude and silence in order to uncover who we really are. Levels even beyond what CoVid restrictions have provided.

“For reasons I won’t go into at this juncture”* I’ve been reading a book by Christopher Heuertz called The Sacred Enneagram. He’s a good ‘dialogue partner’ – someone whose thoughts inspire questions in me and to whom I bring my questions. The great spiritual quest is to answer the question “Why Am I Here?” without reference to the lies “I am what I do”, “I am what others say I am”, “I am what I have”. And the trick is not to hold on to the answer so tightly that it turns into a compulsive behaviour.

In other words, purpose and meaning are the roads inwards but they cannot be what drives the quest.

It feels like a quest, rather than a quest-ion, because the answer morphs over time as we peel back layer after layer after layer until we find our Core, our fear-less, life-full ‘spark’. It is the Quest for Our True Self.

How do you seek that answer?

Chris (taking great liberties to call him that) has a chapter devoted to those 3 “S”es: solitude, silence and stillness. Referencing the Enneagram, he suggests (or at least my embryonic understanding thinks he is) that each ‘type’ (what I am beginning to call ‘Energy Orientation’) responds particularly well to one of those forms to come into contemplative awareness. In other words, we need a profound level of at least one of those in order to peel back the layers of our habitual and self-deceiving ways of operating or relating to the world. Totally paraphrasing, I hear Chris suggesting that to peel back the next layer of our delusion of self-reliance, we need to disrupt what Thomas Keating calls our ‘programs of happiness’.

My body responded to that with the image of tearing out carpeting that’s been glued down. No wonder I woke up with a headache.

Isn’t it enough to notice that I have multiple, nearly dangerous, ripples in the carpet of my program(s) of happiness? Isn’t it enough to know they needs attention? Isn’t it enough to try to find a way to lift small bits at a time, readjust and stretch them to smooth them out? Apparently not.

So I wake up feeling like something has been forcibly ripped from behind my eyes, and has left a gaping hole somewhere in my midsection. And then there’s the glue that has to be scraped off my heart (and skin). Messy job. Tedious job. I am going to have to engage my spiritual superpower of Perseverance (which I tend to be very low in at the best of times).

I live with an almost paralyzing fear that says “What if I don’t get it right?” And whatever it is that feeds that (traditionally religious people might call it ‘Satan’, others might say ‘Sin’ or ‘Evil’) is rooted out by solitude, stillness and silence. Where it gets complicated for me is to know which one works best for me? For my ‘type’? I tailspin back to the start of wondering what’s my ‘type’?

So rather than wallow in that unknowing (which is both easy and debilitating) I am going to apply the therapy of Action Over Inertia: trusting that it’s less important what I do than that I Just Pick A Thing and do it.

So I am going to focus on one practice, each for a week, and see what happens. My hypothesis is that if they all work for different energies, and I have different energies driving each of my head, heart and gut, then one of them is going to get a hit.

As I re-read this post in its entirety, I realized which one I hunch is going to have the most effect. But then again…maybe not.

I’ll keep you informed on which goes best. My faith rests in the hope that the experiment will do some kind of almost cartoon-ish battle with the great monster Acedia, and further me on the quest. I am not sure if I am “Sir Robin the Brave”, the Black Knight, or one of the Crazy Knights who say “Nee”. **

Notes: Having immersed myself in some seriously quirky humour lately * is from Due South and ** is from Monty Python & the Holy Grail. It seems that belly laughter responding to intelligent comedy is not only one of the ways to keep up my superpower, but it’s a sign that the “it’s” working. The headache leaves, the hollowness begins to fill, and my heart is lighter.

I wonder if there is a way to have it also be part of the solitude, stillness and silence??

what’s the View from ‘underneath’

My mechanic either goes into a hole in the ground or gets my car up high on a hydraulic pole so he look at the underneath and can tell me, in the driver’s seat, why my car is making noises that don’t sound so good, or why the car isn’t working the way it could or should. The only way to understand the problem is look at it from underneath.

Many white Canadians, as well as some Christians (nominally or active), are having to face several hard emotions this week because we have had to see our country, and our religion, from a different perspective. It’s harder to see how a system works when you are at the top of it.

We have heard anecdotes, for decades, that brown- and back- skinned people are treated differently than white-skinned people. Being followed in stores. Stopped while driving or walking in affluent neighbourhoods. Being told the apartment they just called about has been rented in the 10 minutes between the call and arriving for a viewing. Being called nasty names as they went into gathering spaces for worship. Having that place of worship vandalized.

Then there’s the anecdotes from women: being touched inappropriately, having lewd suggestions made to them to their face or behind their back, learning to walk a particular way once there are fewer people on the street, holding keys between fingers, avoided badly lit areas.

Heard stories about inappropriate things being said to and about obviously same-sex couples walking hand in hand? Ever had to worry about which bathroom to use because how you urinate biologically is different then the way people see you in the hall or on a street and you know that someone will say something -or worse do something- rude and assign your life a value because if it?

Or tried getting into a building when your legs can’t manage to navigate stairs? Or have to ask someone again to Speak. More. Slowly. because you physically cannot hear wordsthatruntogether?

Or stayed quiet when people ask for your cell number? Or where do you live? Or tried to be served in an official language that is not generally spoken where you live? Or…. Or…. Or….

We’ve all heard the stories. But if you’ve never had that be part of your experience you wont necessarily have noticed it. You aren’t alone. Many people don’t notice these happenings because they aren’t things they/we have to think about on a daily basis. Another word for that is privilege.

If you don’t think that’s a real thing you will continue to be shocked, aghast and sideswiped by news reports of indigenous children dying without record, or people obviously different from you being harassed or beaten, or when families out for a walk are mowed down by a truck.

It is easier to see how a system works when you are not at the top of it.

We need to listen. We need to acknowledge that the horror stories, shared by people brave enough and caring enough to trust us with them, are telling the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard to hear.

And while there will be other ‘sides to the story’ we need to listen to the perspectives we have not, have not wanted, to hear for most of our collective life as a country. Even when they’ve been told hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. But until we acknowledge and come to understand somehow the lived experience, the truth, of others’ experience we cannot even think of figuring out how to offer redress it.

I grew up with the Canadian National Myth that we are a peaceful, multicultural society. It is certainly an ideal to reach for, who we want to be, but, clearly, it is not who we are or have been. Multiculturalism has to be more than being able to find easily a restaurant that serves the food of a different culture than yours.

If “culture” means the expression of an identifiable set of ways of living, or of values, or of heritage and ethnicity, or of making meaning for ones life – where and how you ‘fit’ in this life – then we have a long way to go before we can honestly that we are a country that values the multicultural aspects of our national fabric.

And if you think “they should be more like us“, let me ask: do you speak one of the languages indigenous to the part of the country you live in? I don’t. Do you worship Something Bigger Than Yourself the way people have for millennia where you live? Or did your ancestors, like mine, bring with them their religion, language, music, way of dance, wearing clothes and interacting with others when they arrived here?

Maybe it’s time for those of us a little “higher on the ladder” to sit with being sad and heartbroken and lamenting with the hurt that has been done. And realize with heavy hearts that this is where we have derived or sustain our level of privilege from. And decide something has to change.

Like the mechanic does, often the only way to know why the system isn’t working the way it could or should is to look at it from below. The time has come for us to get out of the car, to look with and listen to those who live in its shadow. And accept what it is they point out as the “something” which is causing the problem. There’s certainly enough stories around.

And, as happens when the mechanic says ‘you’ve got to change this’, there will be a cost. But maybe we can accept that when we know others have been paying the cost for the way things are for far too long.

Community.

I am almost sick of a word that once brought me joy and tears of joy as I remembered “being in community”.

Once, to me, it meant belonging, knowing you really did have a place in the world (if not the universe). Being part of a group going in one direction. Shared values that uplifted, consoled, held one accountable to something larger than our single self.

I wrote my first paper in my diaconal formation on community because of my experience of 15 disparate people coming together, closer-knit than even family, in 6 days. It was transformative.

We came, literally from the Atlantic to Pacific oceans, from different spiritual and religious paths, with different intentions for the 19 days we would be together. And in and through that diversity we came to be a cohesive Whole. It was because we brought different gifts, skills and perspectives that this Amazing Thing happened.

After that I sought out more places of this mystical experience: LGBTQ2S+ and Pride, congregations of United Church, and a couple of Anglican ones, among musicians and poets, among people searching ancient and rooted religious traditions with new eyes, progressive politics. I found it through in-person events, books and book studies, movies and through the embryonic world of email.

Now the word community is used for everything: the business community, the theatre community, the diaconal community, the neighbourhood community, the traveling exhibition community, the car (sometimes add: vintage) enthusiast community, the Indigenous community, the supporters of any given charity or social movement are referred to as ” the [insert name here] community, and there’s online communities that connect for everything from war games to mystical prayer.

Does that word mean anything anymore? Is it a pointer to something beyond “a lot of people like this”? Is that enough?

Maybe it’s just me but I want “community” to mean more than that. I want to reclaim it to mean, or point towards, a group connected enough to care about each other; we may even be reaching towards one goal, although I’m not sure that’s always necessary. I want “community” to mean more than group production.

This past weekend, and in a few more to come, administrative regions of my denomination (#UCCan) will be celebrating coming into the Affirming Ministries community. All these groupings of churches will declare they are publicly, intentionally, and explicitly affirming and welcoming of people of every sexual orientation (yes, we all have one), gender and gender expression. It is something to celebrate! Could it be true of every congregation in the region? Likely not. Do we still belong to that community?

I want to know that if I am part of a community I belong in it, my voice will be listened to, that my part in it matters. Even if (when) I am a dissenting voice. Does “community” need to be strong enough to hold us all? Or are boundaries part of what identifies”a community” distinct from others?

I want community to be about becoming one together in our, with our, and for the good of our, diversity. That we become together more than the sum of our parts. Or am I all wet here?

Leave comments or PM me and share what is “community” for you?

wave upon wave

I took a break after Lent, and instead shared daily responses to a reading meditation (lectio divina). That felt like upzipping my whole self in front of a crowd; I was glad when my self-imposed discipline of “40 days” was up. I tell you that because I took a break here as well; I felt I had wandered too far into the “TMI” zone.

But I need to ‘unzip’ today!

I saw a great poster this weekend:

While it made me laugh out loud, it also caught my gut. I realized that I wasn’t confused so much as I was scrambled inside. Profoundly – in all aspects of word – buffeted by a wide range of emotions. My head, heart and body were spinning.

It started Friday afternoon. From excitement at seeing longtime friends online at a Church meeting, to bracing myself for 3 hrs on Friday and 7 hrs on Saturday, to an online games night, to profound sadness at the news of the finding of the remains of 215 children at the former Indian Residential School site in Kamloops, to grief that there likely will be found more – and if not there then elsewhere, to celebration with that same Church meeting of the public, intentional and explicit (and formal) that everyone regardless of sexual orientation (and yes, we all have one!), gender identity and gender expression are welcome, and then to hear the reality of the largest number of deaths in MB on one day from CoVid-19 AND the others who have died because our hospitals do not have the capacity to treat other people who have critical and life-endangering medical issues. Oh and the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. And preparing multiple worship services with a temperamental computer is in there, somewhere.

Even with breath meditation I was feeling swamped by wave after wave. And because it takes a bit to settle all that energy, today I began before getting out of bed with “Breathe, Heather; Breathe! In-2-3-4 Hold-2-3-4 Out-2-3-4- …”

Today my soul needs to sit with the hope, and the faith that the Psalmist is right: “Where can I go to escape your Spirit? If I go to the highest mountaintop you are there and if I descend to the place of being dead even there you are, waiting for me.”

I give thanks that in these unstable and uncertain times I am not alone; neither are you.

still and all

In the spiritual director’s conference I’ve been attending online we have heard our truth reflected back to us in many ways: attending to the work of the soul is attending to the health of the nation especially in these times of uncertainty and frustration and grief. And yet, it is still a chore.

If it is our soul, our animating force, that drives our motivation to do, that shapes our values, that determines how (or even if) we are in good relationship with others (however you want to define that) as well as ourselves, then it must be vital work to see what is feeding it and what is binding it. No one wants to be bound. Ask an anti-masker.

But I have come to the conclusion that in attending to the needs of our own soul, as well as supporting that work in others and bear witness as others attend to theirs, we also need to ask ourselves what kind of a soul do we want to have?

And that requires brute honesty.

Perhaps that is what makes this feel like hard work, a chore, something I’d rather not face. (And I note, both with glee and with trepidation, it seems I am not alone in that resistance.) Because being honest with ourselves means facing who I am, accepting that I am not the person I think I am, and facing the truth of who I will become if I continue on my path “as is”. That is a far more uncomfortable, because having seen glimpses in others’ lives, my trajectory points to a place I do not want to end.

And so I go and meditate. Whether that practice is looking into myself to see what sullies or binds me or refreshing my will about who I want to become and reset my course. It isn’t superfluous work; it is the grounding work. Feeding the roots of who I am.

Because if I don’t attend it, someone or something else will be glad to come in and do it for me for. In some ways that might make the journey easier in many ways – I’m just along for the ride! But it is the opposite of freedom; it is enslavement.

Ultimately, is what I have to face: what feeds and frees my soul to be my (whatever you name it) Best/ Highest/ Most Compassionate/ Truest/ Redeemed/ God-sparkling/ Light-bearing/ Most Alive Self?

In these times of uncertainty and frustration and grief, it is time to be aware of where my soul, the motor and rudder of my life, is pointing.

And so I come to meditation, what some people might call ‘prayer’. To Silence. To Stillness. To the Well. To what musician (and, not coincidently, priest) calls the “Still-point of the Circle, ’round whom all creation turns’.* And there find The All.

Even all I can do is make space for 5 minutes of the day to be silent, to find my center-point or the beacon to where I want to be, attending to the soul, doing soul work, is the most important work that I will do today.

That transforms the work from chore to chewing the food of my life.

~~ ~ ~ * from Gordon Light Draw the Circle Wide (C) 1994, Common Cup Company (reproduced under OneLicense A721869)

Rethinking requires discernment

Someone asked why I stopped regular writing and I said “it was a Lenten project”, to which she replied: the idea of a Lenten project is to create a new good habit (or lose an old one). She told me to rethink my decision to write.

Yesterday I began an intensive online conference for spiritual companions. Besides, literally, providing space for me to breathe deeper than I have for some time (ironic, given it was the day after the Minneapolis police officer ‘receiving a guilty verdict’) the recurring theme was ‘discernment’. That’s a primary task of the spiritual companioning, helping the Directee to discern where they are being called by the Spirit’s movement.

One exercise in a workshop was to ask ourselves “what does ‘Yes!’ feel like?” A second was “what does your Real ‘No’ feel like? — as opposed to our ‘no’ which is given because of shame, embarrassment, or self-erasement.”

My response (for both) was an immediate ‘my gut tells me’. Except that I ignore it, or push it aside. The truth is I re-think a decision. I send the idea through a series of intellectual sieves. Though the lenses are IMO good (is this ethical? who benefits from my decision? does that make more or less justice? what are the costs to ut? who pays? does it bring more, or less, kindness or compassion to the world? ) the exercise highlighted how deeply I have learned not to trust my felt instinct.

So I guess I have to rethink what I fear if I feel my way to a decision. The idea of allowing my felt gut instinct makes that part of my body nauseous; I wonder if that’s from fear or from excitement?

I do know that I made quick, firm and ‘it just-feels-right’ decisions to buy “a number of books” – the Gut can be pretty loud, insistent and pulls hard sometimes; but the bill is going to be larger than my thinking-mind likes to face.

I think rethinking the role of my felt instinct, and my feeling heart, is going to raise some complex, and likely tear-starting, internal conversation.

And my eyes start to roll. That is another indicator that it is a Spirit-led conversation, one which I will have to continue to wrestle until I receive its blessing.

The rest of the day was One Giant Blessing! Too much to itemize.

I certainly felt affirmed in my footsteps leading me towards more spiritual companioning and supporting a person’s spiritual formation than preaching a particular religious tradition, while still honouring its tools and practices.

It feels like the Nones, Dones, and Independents deserve more of my time and ❤. To which comes the reply:

Use your best spiritual practice: Take a Deep Breath -and trust, dear heart; it’s going to be Quite A Ride.

Rethinking Chaos

My house is cluttered…My office a disaster area…My Happy Place is an office supply store where I can dream of Being Organized.

I am learning that might be a heresy. I love the idea of Order. Idea being the operative word.

I truly believe that The Holy Presence (of Life, if you prefer) is most easily encountered in the chaos of change. Growth is disruptive. It can be uncomfortable, and sometimes downright painful. So how can that be a good thing?

I am coming to the conclusion it is because Life is always moving. Chaos is where the Presence can be seen as the crusts shift, but chaos is not the point: Going Forward is.

Some of the thousands of Canada Geese moving north

To wit: I expect Canada Geese to travel in these lovely (& easy to draw…) “V” shapes. But watching thousands of geese this weekend overhead…Not so much a V for longer than a few seconds as a shifting V. Even that is not orderly; it’s more like a dance of dissolving into chaos for the forward progress to continue. That’s the object, not flying in formation.

That’s a disruptive, uncomfortable thought. It means I need to understand my need for order and control so that it can then be released.

But as the idea is to go forward…I am not absolved of the need to deal with the clutter around me. Maybe it can be organized if not orderly? Maybe that’s enough disruption?

The healing power of grief

The challenge of Good Friday is to stay with the sadness. It is uncomfortable. And when “we know the rest of the story” it is easy for me to keep the story of the torture and execution in my head. Sort of “yes this happened how sad but then…..”

No one likes to stay in the muck. Which is different from being attracted to the gore, like ‘rubber-necking’ at an accident. The muck makes us feel powerless. Can’t change it so move on. But on Good Friday I am called to stay with that reality…for a long as I can.

Which isn’t really long I discovered. I could stay there for a while but then had to do something…rake… sew… Then I would come back to it for a while then go distract myself. I was aware of, as Karen Armstrong puts it, “walking down the spiral staircase”.

At each layer I had to face that I am not in control. I don’t get to decide or ‘write the script’. Yuch. Who wants to stay with that??

But that’s where I experienced the sense of truly not being alone.

I discovered (one more time….) that in recognizing my not being in control (at that depth) there is more space for the warmth of my heart. The divine quality of compassion. Which I experience as companionship in acknowledging “Yes that is so very sad. But that is not all of it…”

I can sit there but I am not Sadness. For the Light Within allows me to see that this awfulness is not how it should be. That is the start of Hope – that What Is is not All There Is….there is More.

Good Friday gives me an opportunity to sit with Awful for More to emerge.

The whole experience brought back images of treating my finger infection. I would soak it for as long as I could in the hottest epsom salt-laden water I could stand. Take it out, say a few “Owowowow!”s then some time later repeat. And slowly (like over days) the infection drizzled out and I was buoyed (another word for hope in my vocabulary) knowing that only by acknowledging how much had to come out could healing begin. And that was just in the fingertip

How much more when it is in the heart and assumptions amd lived experience! I think that’s the point of the Truth & Reconciliation process… the MMIWG process… the December 6th movement… the Black & Indigenous Lives Matter movement, grieving friends and family deaths… Only when the hurting comes out can healing begin. So yesterday Good Friday became a practice ground, training, to hear the sad.

I was fortunate in one of my distraction moments to be led to an amazing reflection by David Giuliano about Compassion seeing the Awful. (An archived piece at http://www.Broadview.org – search Giuliano + Good Friday.) When we can sit with the story long enough (even in spurts) we become enveloped by The More.

So I let myself look at other Awful, aka the news, feel it, sense Compassion emerging.

And therein lies the great divine gift of Presence.

Shadow Places

It feels odd, and I am not just a little awed, by this year’s Christian Holy Week. Starting last Sunday we walk through the last week of Jesus’ life on earth. It is a time of shadows, of clouds gathering.

Last year our wee cluster of congregations began the foray into online observances. It was a time of rough seas and complete trust that ‘whatever is offered to me in Love is accepted’.

This year, it is a time of deeper reflection. As we remember the celebration of Palm Sunday – coinciding with the Second Night of Passover – there is a sense of being liberated from the way things were, celebrating of What Could Be. Then we move through the week into times of conflict, of self-recrimination, of wondering how things could go so terribly wrong….back then and now.

As we sit with increasing CoVid cases all over the country, and with concern here in Manitoba about the ‘variants-of-concern’ is it not the same sense of back then: how could the wheels fall off, and so quickly??? I understand at a new level the frustration of those first followers of Jesus, those pilgrims wandering out of Egypt only to face the Reed Sea with Pharaoh’s Army in hot pursuit. It is good to feel that fear. It is good to sit in the shadows without rushing into the Rescue.

Tonight we observed Jesus’ last night on earth. The one he spent with friends around a table. The Rabbi sharing the unfolding catastrophe that is about to begin. Fear not he says, even as he prays for this horror to be avoided. But he knows this has become the only way to confront evil: hold your ground in the face of it, then, even if/when you die, you die whole.

Maybe that is true as we sit with our wondering about The Virus’ mutation. We keep the course of washing hands, staying physically distant, masked, knowing that even if we do become infected we will have done what we could; we may get sick but we arrive there with no regrets.

Tomorrow we look at the next chapter. And then Saturday we are invited to wait. Wait in unknowing. Just as we wait here and now; with hope in the vaccine but not really knowing… with limitations on gatherings and normal activities with hope it will make a difference but not really knowing… Not unlike waiting to hear the evidence in the Chauvin case. We don’t know what’s coming, but hoping for What Could Be.

But that is what it means to have faith, isn’t it? Sitting in the unknowing, hoping for a life-giving, positive What Could Be.

As I went through the day there was much that tended that spark of hope: a nature walk with a friend, a conversation that wasn’t about work, choosing evocative images for a visio divina, or visual meditation, participating in an observance that called us deeper into the shadows of the passion story… Good food for the soul.

And when technology doesn’t want to co-operate, I am learning that instead of being angry in my frustration, simply to consider the inconvenience and frustration an act of solidarity. Many more people have far worse, life-and-death frustrations. It is good to sit in the shadows for a while, Privilege-riddled First World Chick!