Thursday, December 20, 2007

Merton my hero

"For it is God's love that warms me in the sun and God's love that sends the cold rain. It is God's love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. It is the love of God that sends the winter days when I am cold and sick, and the hot summer when I labor and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God Who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood...If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy. And I would grow together with thousands and millions of other freedoms into the gold of one huge field praising God, loaded with increase,loaded with wheat. If in all things I consider only the heat and the cold, the food or the hunger, the sickness or the labor, the beauty or pleasure, the success and failure and material good or evil my works have won for my own will, I will find only emptiness, not happiness. I shall not be fed, I shall not be full. For my food is the will of Him Who made me and Who made all things in order to give Himself to me through them."

Monday, December 03, 2007

longing for winter

It's raining in Seattle.
Not the soft, damp shroud that usually embraces the city--but wet, rolling, indeterminate rain. It started early this morning. It seems as if it has no intention of stopping.
I'm not accustomed to this kind of rain--the kind that you imagine would make you feel lonely, for the sheer, heavy insistence of it; blocking out the world of all sound but its steady drumming. But strangely, it doesn't. Doesn't make you lonely, I mean. Maybe by blocking out the ambiguous void of the world out there, it has entrapped me in something certain and familiar, unrequested, but needed.
Maybe we get stuck for a reason.
Did you know the rain whispers? It is something that enchants me about this place; the reason I will never be able to settle my soul anywhere but exactly here. And a whisperer casts a spell, weaves you into the eternal and the moment all at once. The rain here does this. Tonight her voice is husky and pregnant with intention.
This place claims me. Sometimes I believe that it is I who have chosen it, but that is not true. I was claimed early on; maybe my cord was buried in the soil as I would like to believe.
Regardless, claimed. Where do I think I can run and find one that would hold me this way...
Stay. for the rain whispers it so.