Passing Through July

But peace, like a poem
 is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except 
in the words of its making....

 A line of peace might appear
 if we restructured the sentences our lives are making,
 ... peace, a presence,
 an energy field more intense than war,
 might pulse then, 
stanza by stanza into the world, 
each act of living
one of its words, each word 
a vibration of light—facets 
of the forming crystal. 

Denise Levertov.
 
 This beautiful image and the proverb that accompanies it is from here.

"Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over,
                                                              it became a butterfly…"
                                                                     
 Photo by Thomas Kitchin &Victoria Hurst



This image along with the Levertov poem prompted a few glancing thoughts for today..

The Franciscan sense of sacred wonder illumines what is counted ordinary, but it also is a vision that refuses to brutalise life.

 Also present and often overlooked in his vision is the way that the process of change is often a slow arduous task that encompasses waiting in hope, in the dark.

It may be painful and laborious work but it carries a fierce if sometimes silent expectation and conviction that hidden beauty is always emerging, that love is not a celebration of one's own reflection but recognising the value and feeling infinite tenderness for the life force of what one can never know.

 The generative potential for change and for new life waiting to be released is an integral part of my faith. 

The butterfly in its compressed chrysalis is part of a dynamic process of the reality of life that I have much to learn from.

 My God is a shelter, and prayer a deep sustenance and then suddenly without warning comes a breakthrough.

 We live out our lives suspended in the condensed triumphs and calamities of a particular time.  We are witnesses and participants in the complexity of the human heart with its propensity for good and evil, its conflicts, failures and successes.

 Somewhere along the way, we are called from the tightness and we are released, divine beauty expands our wings and we fly for a short time.

We are passing through.



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