PHOTO: Mary van Balen I didn’t know the aftermath of divorce would be so difficult, just like I didn’t know my marriage would be untenable. It isn’t what I miss. Surely the good that came of the marriage took root and lives. And of course there are my grown children. No, it is not the missing. It is the acceptance of who I am and where I am that is the struggle.
As the Carmelite poet, Jessica Powers writes in her poem, “To Live with the Spirit,” I am learning to be a listener. Throughout my life I have tried to be a listener to the God Within, so perhaps a more accurate account of my present journey is learning to be a better listener: One who trusts, one who is more comfortable with silence.
Psalm 62, from today’s Morning Prayer, comes at this same truth from another angle: “In God alone be at rest, my soul, for my hope is from her…Trust God at all times, O people. Pour out your hearts before him, for God is our refuge…”
Jessica Powers writes that the soul who lives with the Spirit “…walks in waylessness, unknowing;/it has cast down forever from its hand/the compass of the wither and the why…”
That’s my problem. I want to know the “wither and the why.” I want to know where my books are going (or not). I want to know why I work at a job that makes involvement in other regular activities impossible. I want to know how long. I want to know just where this path is taking me anyway. At the moment, I can’t see very far ahead. I want to know because in the answers I look for validation, for purpose.
I have more to learn about being a listener. Perhaps that fact is precisely why I am in the places I am. But there I go again, wanting to know the “why.”
I am not proposing that one do nothing, no planning, no job searching, no writing or sending out manuscripts. Still, in the midst of working and the activities of our daily lives, the Spirit is speaking.
Lent reminds me to listen. And to trust.
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