The River in Me

One year ago, on the Sunday right before Ash Wednesday, I left church fighting back tears and went down to the river to pray.  A year has passed since that date and I am once again experiencing some of that sadness.  But this time the river I turn to does not beat against eagle-nested shores, but ebbs and flows in me.  Perhaps the sadness is just that ever-present longing- loss of our loved ones and friends is constant, and the more we age, the more we experience.  There is joy, and there is loneliness that follows.  And there is falling and finding again.  It is the secret wisdom to be one with that flow, and to stay steady-- even as I feel the sadness and acknowledge it, I am not overtaken and immobilized by it.  I recall on a recent spiritual direction meeting in Silver Bay, words my teacher said about not blocking the emotions that come.  I let them come; tears fall, but I do not fall apart.

It is from that opening that compassion flows.  Twice today I felt my eyes well with tears, in empathy.  Perhaps the empathy was strong because I know the chords of absence and longing so intimately myself.  There was a woman whose fiance had just died, and there was another who revealed an unexpressed feeling of abandonment. And my own heart rose, raw and vulnerable-- though my response was kind.

These are not tears of self-pity now, as I turn again to the quiet of this room and the patterns of this page.  This is a place of restoration, a river of living water and replenishment.  It has been some months of wandering in the desert, but it is time for a return.  Of course, Lent is associated more closely with deserts than with rivers, and I do not expect any sudden revelations from my contemplation.  Rather, I hope to find that thing that makes me wait, that emptying and purging that helps me to prepare.  The river will come, in time-- gatherings of many kinds I foresee.  And more I cannot foresee.

There is prophecy, but so much is yet to be foretold.  There are only the lines of a letter, and all that is longed and hoped for will be revealed in time.