Once there was a great bombing, and I had my baby sister with me. I had Maria on my back and I was running back home, but I could not breathe, I could not swallow. I could not say anything. When I came home, mamika embraced me. She said, "Why are you so frightened?" That was such a balm to me. Her words still live inside me. She said, "All of us will meet anyway, even if they kill you. "There was such a strength for me in those moments. Through my mother's calm, unshakeable faith, God came to comfort me.
Unfortunately, change and forgiveness do not come easily for me, but ANY willingness to let go inevitably comes from pain; and the desire to change and forgive changes you, and jiggles the spirit, gets to it somehow, to the deepest, hardest, most ruined parts. And then Spirit expands, because that is its nature, and it brings along the body, and finally, the mind.
Steeping ourselves in a place, simmering in its bounties, celebrating its wonders, and loving its peculiarities are necessary steps on a spiritual journey. We often take for granted the places where we work and play. To get to know them again, or perhaps for the first time, involves acts of consecration and imagination. Or as Wendell Berry puts it: "My most inspiring thought is that this place, if I am to live well in it, requires and deserves a lifetime of the most careful attention."
The silence of the marsh was so profound that it could have been the flip side of the singing in my church. Just last Sunday the people had sung the old spiritual, "Go Down, Moses," a cappella because the pianist was gone, and a bunch of people were crying, singing very loudly with their eyes closed, and the singing of that cry of a song was a wonderful form of communion. How come you can hear a chord, and then another chord, and then your heart breaks open?
