In my imagination, I
could see myself picking up words, looking through them at what lay beyond;
draping them like shawls; offering them on raised hands—lifting them up;
scooping them from puddles and pools, allowing them to wash over me and make me
laugh and smile; drinking them from waterfalls, filling up with the life their
waters contain…allowing them to take my shape and feeling my own shape change
and swell with liberation as they lived into my marrow and whispered their
secret beauties. (KMK on CTL, May 6, 2009, ‘Playing with Treasure’)
~Vincent VanGogh, in
his letters to his brother, Theo, outlined a life filled with the
tangible. Vincent loved to look, to
touch, to smell, and to taste the world about him. Most of all, he loved to look, and then feel,
with his hands grasping the charcoal or brush, what he had just seen. His hands roamed all over his mind, trying to
decipher the different grains of thought and emotion…~Writer Lucy Grealy in an
essay called “My God.”
I spent the last several days at the Religious of Atlantic
Canada conference which took place at a local university. The theme was “Keep your Hand on the Plough.”
Over the course of the gathering, I found myself talking about things that are
important to me with around 40 other Sisters from at least six different
congregations: It was so refreshing to
splash my hands in the pools of my heart and draw forth JOY…draw forth DELIGHT
and FREEDOM…to feel the sustaining vibration of LAUGHTER as it saw new light… Each
of these words are filled with experience…they wriggle with those grains of
thought and emotion; they wriggle with the divine stuff of life that cannot be contained…and it was gift
to hear and to feel them whisper their secret beauties once again.
That was gift, just as it was gift to hear the life-words of
others…to hear the sound of voices merging when we prayed by singing…to
have newly met many people who have also said Yes to God and to great mystery
and grand adventure with all that they have to offer.
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