"I don't say anything.
I just listen."
Over the last week I have gotten up and down from my mental soapbox so many times I’ve lost count. Here on the page, and in the confines of my own mind. Turning the facts over and over, trying to make sense of it all. The only sense I’ve been able to make at all is that I won’t be able to make sense of what is happening all around me, in this country, in our world. I can’t make sense of it.
What I can move towards in understanding is what’s plainly right in front of me. Only the here, and the now. This now, and this now, and this now again. The real, immutable truths of life happening before my very eyes.
In the face of everything that’s worthy of despair at the moment, instead, I am committing myself to a Daily Discipline of Devotion to Delight. And yes, this obnoxious title is required for so simple a thing. Since we arrived here in the woods exactly a month ago, I’ve been taking stock of these whispered, wispy moments of awe that brush up against and through the edges of life. They are the slivers of sunlight reflecting off the brook in the backyard that I catch only if I’m tuned into attention. Only if I’m not distracted by despondency.
Ever since reading DJD’s Sun House, I’ve been carrying around an anecdote he shared about a rare televised interview that Dan Rather did with Mother Theresa shortly before she died. Maybe you know it, too. He asks her what she says to God when she prays. Mother Theresa says, “I don’t say anything. I just listen.” So he asks her, what does God say to you? And she says,
“He doesn’t say anything. He just listens.
And if you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you.”