I’m beginning to sense the rhythm and sway of a stone that on the surface shows no movement. I come without a sense of time, no clock ticking it away, but respond to the sound of the bells almost without awareness.
No one says, “Stand up.” No one says, “Take your seat.” Still, I move in time to the hollow notes without a Protestant hiccup. Though I couldn’t tell you later the order of the liturgical process, my spirit remembers the rhythm in its practice.
And this is good.
Say what you will about Job’s friends. It’s true. Once they started yammering, they wove their strands of talking points between what was true and what they only wished were true until it’s no wonder Job didn’t lash them all together with that rope and walk away, leaving them bound to discuss his plight amongst themselves into exhaustion.
But for seven days — an entire week — they held their knowing tongues and grieved alongside their friend in silence.
When they arrived, Job was in such emotional anguish and physical distress they did not even recognize him. This could no longer be the greatest man in the East. He was a blistered and scabbed shell of a man, the rhythmic scraping of his flesh with a shard of sun baked clay the only sign he was even still alive. Read the rest of this page »
Why is everyone hungry for more?
“More, more,” they say. ”More, more.”
I have God’s more-than-enough,
More joy in one ordinary day
Than they get in all their shopping sprees.
At day’s end I’m ready for sound sleep,
For you, God, have put my life back together.
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The words of David, upon being answered.
Psalm 4 for your Sabbath Preparation.
Find some quiet contemplation in these weekend communities:
The regular return to the psalmist’s lament, his unrelenting darkness, his inescapable sense of abandonment — in some odd way I find this comforting. I remember my own need to sit in the lament now and then. Even here, straight-backed in a hard wooden pew where the words of his anguish ricochet off cold stone walls.
Heman ends in despair. His last words do not return to hope. And yet I consider as I listen, as I recite, that though he speaks as though convinced God had stepped out of the room, he continues to pour out his heart, to talk to the one he believes had walked away.
And I wonder if he believes it at all.
The last time I spent any time with a book by Julia Cameron, I got into an altercation with my Writer. She hovered over my desk, whining relentlessly about how everyone else’s Muse went for long walks and exotic dates, sipping tea hot tea and macchiatos at tables adorned with fresh cut flowers.
I lost my temper and whipped a pencil, aiming between her doe eyes. She slunk away whimpering to the showers. Not long afterwards, I looked up to see her dripping form, wrapped in a towel and reaching out from the dim shadows of my office with a crumpled, soggy scrap of paper. (Read the rest at Tweetspeak Poetry…)
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We’re starting a new book club soon. I’ve been down this road before. Or on these tracks, anyway. I’m a little anxious. (Pick whichever definition you like.) Head on over to Tweetspeak to find out why, and get your invitation to join us in a new discussion of Julia Cameron’s landmark book on creative renewal, The Artist’s Way.
MAKING HEADROOM chronicles a year 
In Line at Tweetspeak
Content & Community at The High Calling
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