I don’t always believe that goodness is already here waiting for me, in the home that is myself.
I don’t always believe I know how to head home, the way the wild geese know how to head home.
Last week’s #Adventwords, which are pulled from the lectionary texts, are “doing” words - walking, teaching, making, being ready.
This week begins with rain.
When it rains, we wait while the rain does its work. Rain is permission to rest.
“Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers”
I’ve had this ripped up Mary Oliver taped poem on my wall through five moves. It was printed on the back of my chaplaincy internship program at Grady, and I hadn’t read it before. I was fully startled by that first line. I’m still startled by it. How can we dare, it’s irresponsible, it’s anti-Gospel, it’s selfish.
I don’t know how to trust that like the wild geese, there is a deep instinct inside me that will bring me home - that God has placed eternity in our heart, & our heart knows the way home.
Merton says we are whole when we stop trying to be anyone or anything else. We get lost when we build our holiness Tower of Babel, putting more things on ourselves to reach God, impress God, impress ourselves. We get lost in disciplining ourselves & disciplining others, forcing everything into the shape of goodness we made into our own image, an idol we created from our false selves.
We get lost trying to add more to ourselves to be good, instead of believing our unadorned self is already hidden with Christ in God. It’s hard to believe that badness is just how we try to be more than we are. It’s hard to believe that we are enough, like the rain is enough, like the wild geese are enough.
Maybe being good is more like coming home than scaling a mountain or “beating our body into submission.”
Meanwhile, it’s raining outside while I write this in my tiny house. Meanwhile, I take a breath and put down the computer and listen, for just a second. Meanwhile, if I finish this piece this morning or tonight or don’t finish it at all, the rain goes on, and my soul waits for me to come home, waiting in silence for God only.