Thank You

Outside my house, I hear the first really heavy rain of the season. There is no wind today. The water falls straight down, and the sound in the forest outside my window is a hushed shushing. The leaves and rocks and grass and gravel of the driveway receive the million little splashes, and together they make the sound of the edge of the ocean’s surf.

Inside my house, there will be candles lit at sundown. Inside my soul, a small warmth of new fire has been lighted.

Jesus among his Students, Rembrandt

The Anglican part of Christendom receives its heritage from both east and west. We share our customs and rites and prayer life with both Rome and Constantinople. I came to my Anglicanism through the western gate, and I have lived here, in this Anglican dwelling, for sixteen years. At last, the teachers from the East have found me.

With my Aves I now entwine the Jesus Prayer, and for balm and oil to my intellectual understanding, I release my certitude and embrace the generative, creativity of paradox. Into every task, the breath begins to pulse. Mary’s prayer and Martha’s work. Ora et labora, both with devotion, each to each may speak. I am so full of gratitude for the warmth and light of it that I fall silent. I have not come now for answers, but only to be here – in this light – where He is.

“Go, sell, give and so become poor. Take up your cross and follow Him into the moment … as leaven into the dough of humanity that it may rise to become bread of Eucharist for the hungry … As leaven, invisible that He might be visible … being flung out to the furthest places by His centrifugal love and at the same time being pulled paradoxically into the center by His centripetal love … as salt, light, leaven and branch to the edges and to the centre of a savorless, dark, flat and barren world … Reveal Jesus, follow Jesus revealed … poor, as Jesus was poor … Pray always.” ~ Fr. Seraphim, OJN

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