Conversations and Sundays

A pleasant surprise from visitors this Sunday morning fills our family room with cozy conversations and hopeful refrains. The darkness of yesterday seems to have lifted and connecting with family from Cebu strengthens the resolve to lift up our gaze again. I’ve resolved to stop looking at the diagnosis on Mom’s table or try to understand the medical terms that always sound scary in every way. And just focus on the hope that is present no matter how hidden in every moment.

My rhythm fell out of beat and I’ve pondered all night as to its cause. It cannot be determined and I am reminded by a priest who told me once, “We forget that life is a mystery and we get frustrated when we cannot understand. Sometimes we are not meant to understand everything. That’s why we Catholics call our walk, a walk of faith.”

Reading 2 chapters of Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd has allowed me to reconnect with something essential to my journey right now. The bond of mother and daughter. In the book she describes the passion of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and her daughter Persephone. She describes Demeter’s pursuit of Persephone when she disappeared underground to the kingdom of Hades. This pursuit of a mother for a daughter becomes a violent passion that I never completely understood since I do not have children. But perhaps I can partially understand this compelling force that drives a human being to pursue a cause to overcome something humanly impossible now that my own mother has cancer.

This compelling force that drives the human spirit is never always known or grasped. It is just is, there.

I try to come to terms with it. It’s brute force. It’s restless beckoning. It’s captivating croon. And I call it faith. It is something I hold and then surrender in a rhythm swaying like the lulling of a hammock. Always quieting down. Always a stepping into peace.

The morning is hot at 10am. It feels like noon. My aunt and uncle carry Mom into a lively conversation while I try to find words to the thoughts that have been dangling around carelessly in my head. I surmise, if I can string words in the middle of a situation and weave a tapestry of paragraphs for every occasion I will probably always find myself content.

So here is the nth resolve. And I pray to the patron of writers dear St. Francis de Sales. Please keep my pen warm with stories and create for my words a voice. And I will tell of the hope hidden in every mystery and the love birthed from every pain to every soul who simply sits with me.

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