The Slow Way Newsletter: Stretching Toward Love
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Stretching Toward Love
Thursday night I had the chance to see Sandra McCracken perform at a small little venue in New York. Sandra’s music has been a friend since my twenties when I forced my dear grandmother to listen to “Springtime Indiana” from the Gypsy Flat Road album all the way through actual Indiana on a road trip. I have had a Sandra song to go with most major moments since then. And in her new cover album she basically chose a handful of songs of my heart, just so my chest would leap.
Last night she sang Leonard Cohen: Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There’s a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.
I’ve been thinking about light and darkness and waiting. This season of Lent is meant to be a season of darkness, an intentional time outside of feasting, outside of usual comforts. That intentionality is there as a way of pushing ourselves to notice that we are already living in a shadowed world, so used to dimness that we mistake the vague grayscale of our lives for color. Lent is a season to remind ourselves to see our own cracks and those around us as an invitation to more. Without seasons of intentional excavation of the shadows we live in, and the search for light, we can convince ourselves that the darkness is all there is: wars and power-mongering, individual glory at the expense of the common good, our own self-hatred and shame. But when we attend to those broken spaces, we find a way to the light we don’t always even know we’re seeking. Light of life that floods into our monochrome universe, offering us eyes to see that though we don’t hold the whole of reality – all the light and color our deepest selves know to be true — it is actually there, beyond the cracks of human failure, shining through.
We’re coming up on my middle son Brooks’ birthday this next week. He’ll turn eleven and I’ll have to reckon even further with the reality that time is swinging the earth around the sun at an inappropriate rate. When I think about Lent, I think of Brooks coming into the world. The perfect sunshine of March in San Francisco the year he was born. The fear I carried with me into that delivery. The darkness of the womb and the reckless passage of light we find in birth.
Lent is for waiting isn’t it? Waiting through the night. Waiting for the light to dawn, even if it’s just showing up in the cracks. This week I watched the beginning daffodils in my garden press out of the ground, despite the relentless cold of winter that keeps trying to stamp them down. All this time, they have been attending to the dark, waiting there for the first sign of loose soil, the first chance to push upward. Simone Weil spoke about waiting as an active form of learning. We don’t gain insights, she said, by searching for them. Instead we gain them by waiting “upon truth, setting our hearts upon it.” She goes on to say, “There is a way of waiting when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen.” This is an act of attention, this waiting. We talked a couple of weeks ago about . Weil’s idea of waiting feels similar. A muscular waiting: Pen on paper, not straining, but activating the imagination, ready to receive.
In his newsletter, L.M. Sacasas points to Weil’s words as an example of this active form of noticing. He says that “the words attention and attending are related to the Latin word attendere, a word that suggests the concept of ‘stretching toward.’” Stretching toward is a spiritual act, like the daffodil pushing itself through the darkness of the soil, like Emily Dickinson in her poem 1619: “Not knowing when Dawn will come / I open every Door.” She waits in the darkness for dawn. But her waiting includes opening all possible passages toward the coming light. So when the blaze hits the shelf of the earth, her rooms will be lit right along with it.
This is waiting as a form of active engagement. Sacasas differentiates between the idea of paying attention and attending. He says we have a finite amount of attention we can offer in a day, but that the act of attending? That is a way of being, a spiritual act.
Lent may be the season when we wait in the darkness for light to break through. But it’s also the season when we hold up the cracks so the light can twinkle its pattern on the wall. It’s also the season when we open all the doors to catch the dawn. When we stretch toward possible healing, believing that all will be made well. All manner of things.
Stretching toward our lives in love: We attend to our lives. And maybe that is the great work of life on earth. In the darkest seasons, in the wars, and the confusion, we wait for the light to dawn. We believe it will come. We attend to it.
How are you attending to your world? Maybe the work of love is most simply realized in the spiritual act of attending. Stretching toward your life, caring for yourself by attending to your spirit’s discontent, your body’s pain. Attending to your neighbor by noticing need and choosing to arrive, warm loaf of bread in hand. Stretching toward your community, eyes open for collective joy and need. Attending to your culture by seeing injustice and pushing your particular corner of the world toward goodness.
a slow practice
What if attending in love is the great work of our lives?
This week my church’s Lenten book of guided prayer and meditations shared a quote from Hildegard of Bingen, speaking in the voice of the divine: “I flame above the beauty of the fields; I shine in the waters; in the sun, the moon and the stars, I burn . . . I stir everything into quickness with a certain invisible life which sustains all.”
If attending is a spiritual practice, let’s consider the kind of attending dear Hildegard was doing when she penned those words. To see God stirring everything into quickness. Today we can practice attending to the presence of the Holy One in the world around us.
Let’s start by taking a breath:
Breathe in
Breathe out
In the practice of Lectio divina, we listen with our bodies to the words of scripture. We ask the presence of God’s spirit to speak. And we come back to the words over again and again, slowly and intentionally.
Today I want to combine that practice with imaginative prayer:
I want you to imagine a place where you might wait for someone you love. Maybe the couch you sit on while you wait on your partner to get ready to go out. Or the porch where you sit in the sunshine waiting for a friend to arrive for a weekend visit. I think of the stairs to our front porch where I wait everyday – rain or shine – for Ace’s school bus to bring him home. Where do you wait?
Can you imagine yourself sitting there in that place? If it’s soft, imagine how it feels when you lean into the cushion. If it’s hard like the porch step, imagine running your hands along the wood. Feel the nails and the rough patches. Look around the space in your imagination. See the color, the artifacts around you. If you’re outside in your imagination, look at the sky, the trees, the buildings in your line of vision.
As you imagine yourself in that space, I want you to listen to these words from Psalm 27, verses 13-14. (If you’d like to sit with the entire Psalm you can find it here.)
I’ll read it aloud once, and give you some time to sit with it. As I say each word practice attending, stretching toward it. Notice if one word stirs you, or is louder to your heart or gut than any of the others.
I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.
Before I read it again, look around your imaginative space, where you’re waiting. If there’s a word that stands out. Maybe you want to say it out loud. Or whisper it to yourself.
Let’s listen again. This time, maybe that word will be noticeable for you again. Maybe a phrase will stand out to you. Just listen and notice.
I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.
Sit and imagine you are waiting in that space, in the chair, on the step, for the light to break in, for the Lord to show up in the land of the living. This is an active work of taking heart.
Listen one more time, and this time ask the spirit of God to give you a takeaway: a thought to hold, a sense of comfort, a question to ponder.
I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.
Is there something in these words for you? An action to take, a question to sit with, a story you want to say out loud to God? Let’s sit for a bit in silence.