Apartment Psalms

8 February 2015 - Much has happened in a year...

Dearest Amelia, you have been like the first ray of summer in this long, cold winter of mine.

Dear God, I am sailing out onto the open sea. I have left the moorings that tied down my little boat, the safety of the river bank. Soon I will arrive at a vastness bewildering to my senses

Trying to live as a whole person requires some measure of vulnerability. Martha Nussbaum wrote, “don't despise your inner world”.

1 January 2015. The beginning of another new year. This new year, there are things for my heart and mind to reconcile - this new perspective I am gaining and my faith.

It is three thirty am and I can't sleep. I want to write a book on how the heart heals. I've supposed myself to have come out, someway at least, on the other side. But when morning is soon to break, and you've spent the last few hours watching sitcoms, while the cough in your chest won't go away, and you have no one to tell all of these to, things feel a little funny. 

My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.

The land around me has yet to give itself up fully to the cold; the wild geese have flown off, but autumn is still tethered to the last vestiges of summer, sunlight still dapples the land. In my heart though, it is a different story. It has been winter for a long while. 

There will come a time when you will lift the ashes of your despair, and find, as it falls through your fingers, something weightier than gold. There will come a time when a sudden wind turns your fall, long as it has been, into illimitable flight.

Things will get darker, but our job is to shine brighter. 

"Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm".

Freely you have received, freely you shall give. How far we have strayed from this precept, forgetting that all we have is a gift from God.

Dear Eva, I walked to the old quarry this morning. I have known it for six years.

If only this grief had voice, how it would sing. When I remember the meadows, gilded golden by the sun; the pine trees in winter, burying the deep scent of a coming spring; the times spent on a solitary bench, with only the gulls crying out in the distance; then and only then, does this ache in my heart ease a little, for I remember you, how you filled all things...

Dear God, your word is wide and expansive, it encompasses the universe. I know not how to navigate it, lest you guide me with your spirit...

You ask me how I am feeling. I'm not devastated, no. But I can't shake off the thought that if I peer into my own soul, the landscape is a little bleak...

...To have a stronger heart, to have a wider imagination, to have the beauty of a craft, these seem more corporeal than a vague promise of divine sufficiency flooding mortal frailty...

I had a wonderful cycle through a forest of leaves and light. The heart was glad with a quiet gladness it has not felt for awhile...

The heart wobbled on Thursday and Friday, nagged by old insecurities...

Lord, it is not that I do not want your glory. I want it more than anything – but not merely in the chorus of angels, or the flight of eagles...