Good morning…
Gone. Eerie. Devastating. These are just a few of the words traveling from Florida’s panhandle through our TV screens. Shattering. Twisting. Splintering. Aerial images of Mexico Beach show the ravages of Hurricane Michael. Power out. War zone. Ground zero.
At ground zero, our lives are reduced to rubble. From the raw wreckage, we stumble into the first and the final lines of a poem by Rumi entitled “An Empty Garlic.” He begins: “You miss the garden because you want a small fig from a random tree.” He concludes: “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”
Paula D’Arcy writes: “My friend Janie, who introduced me to these lines, says she has often taken the last lines and broken the words apart to plumb them for meaning: the pull, the stronger pull. Drawn, silently drawn. What you love, what you really love. Letting yourself be silently drawn by the strong pull of what you really love is the opposite of running away. But you must decide what you really love and trust that which draws you.” (Seeking With All Your Heart, 64-65)
Sifting through life’s ruins, we decide what we really love and we trust the strong, silent pull of the God who restores everything essential.
“If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight. I will always show you where to go. I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places— firm muscles, strong bones. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry. You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again” (Isaiah 58:9b-12).
…Sue…
