Idle and Blessed

Kels and I have this thing where we pick a word for each new year. I think it's actually a thing for lots of people, but we keep ours on the DL. So little-known fact: I have a word for 2015, and it's a positive uplifting idea that makes a lot of sense for where I am in life right now. But you want to know something? If I had to describe this year so far in one word, it would not be that one. It would be "overwhelmed." I started 2015 by taking an intensive seminar course on immigration and the American church. 43 hours of class time in the first week of January is a very interesting concept. It was a fantastic course, but after being immersed in the complexities of American immigration and its effect on the church, "overwhelming" is the only word I have to describe it. I take on the problems and the sadness of certain issues, and immigration is one of them. Last Sunday, the second weekend of 2015, I was received into the Episcopal Church by Bishop Wrigh...

I was there with the first mythmakers and monks who made up your stories, traced your runes. But now I see you: wind, woods, and water, roaring at the rim of Christendom -- you, land, to be left in darkness. I want to utter you. I want to portray you not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple  bark. There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse. I want, then, simply to say the names of things. I'll leave aside kings and their lineages, their deeds and battles. For you are the ground. The ages to you are only seasons. from Rilke's Book of Hours

There is a lot I'm afraid of. There's a lot that makes my heart race when I sit still enough to notice. Sometimes I have the sun to make me brave, on the days when it can shine strong enough through the clouds. Other times I have the trails. There's sometimes the liturgy, which makes a home-feeling settle me down. I can be brave for a day after that. The stars, too, or the silence of winter, or the right song through my headphones on a Monday. And then sometimes none of that finds me and I forget I was ever free at all. But that was yesterday, and today I feel hope, because there are one or two people in my life who remind me about freedom, which is the Spirit of God in me, even when I am afraid. Even when the sun can't shine strong enough through the clouds. Maybe even more so then.