Good morning…
Typically, for the classes I teach, our winter/spring semester concludes just before Holy Week. This winter, with Easter being so early, our final classes are scheduled for the last week of March.
“We don’t want to end that early,” my Thursday class protested. “Can we do another book together in the month of April?”
I agreed to pray about the possibility, and God drew me to the perfect book to partner with our current read, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat In Difficult Times by Katherine May. I will share with you a story which highlights the soulful connection between these two books.
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Excerpt from Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer, pages 101-102
A few years ago, my father died. He was more than a good man, and the months following his death were a long, hard winter for me. But in the midst of that ice and loss, I came into a certain clarity that I lacked when he was alive. I saw something that had been concealed when the luxuriance of his love surrounded me – saw how I had relied on him to help me cushion life’s harsher blows. When he could no longer do that, my first thought was, “Now I must do it for myself.” But as time went on, I saw a deeper truth: it never was my father absorbing those blows but a larger and deeper grace that he taught me to rely on.
When my father was alive, I confused the teaching with the teacher. My teacher is gone now, but the grace is still there – and my clarity about that fact has allowed his teaching to take deeper root in me. Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being.
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In class yesterday, we read this quote from page 144 in Wintering. “I spotted the faint glow of the aurora above the harbor and supposed it might have been there all along. Just waiting for me to learn how to see it.”
The Creator of life, the Giver of grace helps us to learn how to see. It is I who made the very ground on which you stand, I who shaped the human beings who walk around on it. I pulled the sky and the heavens taut with My own hands, and organized the army of stars that march across the night sky (Isaiah 45:12, VOICE).
With this brutal winter as our teacher, might we learn how to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being?
…Sue…
