I went to Mass yesterday-- a good move on my part. I'd been out wandering about without specific aim when I realized it was nearly noon and Xavier was only a block or two away. While sitting in the Mary Chapel, the pastor approached me about how much he enjoyed the Isaiah reading I did for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. 'Mesmerizing' was the word he used. The director of music had already told me that he was blown away.
I'm glad the emotion came through...because that is how I hear those readings-- alive, breathing, lifted free from the page and allowed to take shape in sound, allowed to splash across the canvas of hearing and feeling and leave image and movement hanging in the midst long enough to be felt and recognized but also light and loose enough to disperse and become a part of the larger whole.
It was a place to set myself free from feeling as bound as I have lately--bound by knots of my own making that appeared in threads of my life that I thought I had gently looped. It is nigh unto impossible to disentangle one's own knots in situations like that, I have discovered of late. Beginning? End? Which part to let go so that something else can be pulled through?
The reading that night had a lasting effect over these past days... to fill with Word, to taste the goodness, form it, free it...this is necessary nourishment for me that loosens my heart, mind, and body. It helps me regain that flexibility of spirit that allows for bending and bowing and dancing anew, unknotted and freer--though still with threads that dangle and promise to try again.
I know soemthing that helps, though, when that happens. Allowing it is an amazing, humbling thing that leaves me thankful, and though you'd be hard pressed to tell by reading this, without Word of my own-- until it returns in honeyed wonder.
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