Broken
Branches
“It's
as if what is unbreakable--
the
very pulse of life—waits for
everything
else to be torn away,
and
then in the bareness that
only
silence and suffering and
great
love can expose, it dares
to
speak through us, and to us...”
Mark
Nepo; excerpt from “Where Is God?” in Reduced to Joy
In
the winter of 1978, I stood at the window in a cold, half-empty
house, and watched the oak tree outside lose every single one of its
branches. Ice formed, weighed them down, then a gun-shot crack, as each one snapped off and fell, with an earth-shaking thud, to the
ground. By the end of the day, there remained only a sixty-foot-high
stump surrounded by brokenness. There was something beautiful in the
bareness of it, in the honed down essential image. We took photos of
black branches in the white snow, their ice casings still glinting in
the weak winter sun.
That's
how faith works. Most of us have to be stripped down to our core to
let go, admit powerlessness, and rely solely on trust. I don't know
about you, but routinely, I pray for things to be the way I want them
to be. I say I turn this situation, or person, or circumstance over
to the will of God, but, truly, within the hour, I've grabbed it
back, thinking I know what the “right” outcome should be. Trust
is hard to come by for some of us.
I
find, though, in the unguarded moment, when I'm not trying to stand
at the helm and steer the ship, God is sometimes able to get a word
in edgewise. I'll have a clarifying thought, or say something to
another person, and wonder, “Where did that come from?”
Certainly, not from me. We humans typically have to smack into the
brick wall of “I-can't-do-this-anymore,” to let go of control,
and allow divine light to show through us and expose our broken
branches scattered on the ground. It's a beautiful moment.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment