Tag Archives: quiet

Jan 03 2013
1 Comment
grief and trauma, learning to live, Quotes, what they are teaching me

scarred by struggle, transformed by hope

scarred-by-struggle,-transformed-by-hope
I received a book in the mail today from a friend I met through the blog.

Multiple conversations have been had via email, with time and oceans in between, about issues of faith and justice and loss and hope and hopelessness and holding on. When I recently had a time of near blog-silence, she checked in to see how things were. She immediately hit right on the nature of the issues adding to the silence, and gracefully wrote words that echoed like prayers of acceptance of creative silence, and requesting of hopeful imagination.

And today, after waking up to run, pour a slow cup of coffee and then get back to work at Area Relief Ministries for the first time since mid-December, I walked in to see a package on my desk. I opened it up and immediately knew who it was from, as this friend had referenced the book in an email during those dry days.

The following is an excerpt, and the book itself, sitting on my desk in its packaging waiting quietly like the sneaky gift it was is now a reminder, of how the kingdom community is broader and larger and more powerful than I remember on most days. It is ebbing and flowing in and out of our quiet and alive places, keeping us moving and pushing forward, even when we aren’t sure why it’s worth it.

So to this friend, and the other friends of which there are many brave and marginalized kingdom-souls, who are willing to tell the stories of struggle in an effort to sing the true songs of hope, I cannot say thank you enough.

djordan
108 S Church

“Hope is rooted in the past but believes in the future. God’s world is in God’s hands, hope says, and therefore cannot possibly be hopeless. Life, already fulfilled in God, is only the process of coming to realize that we have been given everything we need to come to fullness of life, both here and hereafter. The greater the hope, the greater the appreciation of life now, the greater the confidence in the future, whatever it is. 

But if struggle is the process of evolution from spiritual emptiness to spiritual wisdom, hope is a process as well. Hope, the response of the spiritual person to struggle, takes us from the risk of inner stagnation, of emotional despair, to a total transformation of life. … The spirituality of struggle gives birth to the spirituality of hope.” 

from “Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope,” by J.D. Chittister

 

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Sep 15 2012
3 Comments
learning to live, poems

silence drips into pure gold

 

in those moments where it takes all we are
to keep our mouths closed
to keep our eyes forward
to keep our tongues tamed

in those scenarios where we are eager to speak
eager to tell
eager to explain
eager to defend
eager to debate

in those moments where it takes all we are
because we are so eager
to trust the truth to be known with or without our insistence

our silence drips into pure gold
and we learn to be confident in the truth
rather than our defense of the truth

djordan
Pine Tree

 

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Jan 21 2012
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on

on silence

Silence

Propped up in the bed holding the book, I must have been so chained down to the story that when the fly came barreling straight past my left ear, I nearly yelled. It was early morning, the kind of early morning that really belongs to the late evening before, and I was sucking the words off every page. I had become so silent that I was more startled by the fact that a fly could buzz past me than I was by the fly itself.

I laughed at my overreaction, and went immediately back into the book. Of course, thirty seconds later, the same fly and the same startled overreaction. Four times this happened. Every time, I was caught completely unaware.

 

Silence

I stretched out on an empty bench, looking at the great mountain as my park backdrop, thinking for just a moment about the perfect Sunday afternoonishness of it all, and I started to read. Silence.

But the silence was different this time. It was loud.

The winds were so strong that I could hear them crashing into my ears. That was the foreground noise, and the people and kids playing, laughing and running were the background noise. I could hear all kinds of things, and yet nothing at all. My mind had quieted completely. It was a perfectly loud, Sunday-afternoon kind of silence.

 

Silence

I think of times when I knew a horrible conversation of conflict was about to happen, or a horrible event was unfolding, and everything­­––whether there was other audible noise or not didn’t matter––everything became so silent.

Except for my heartbeat.

My body became cavernous and my heartbeat became connected to a loudspeaker that only I could hear. It’s the kind of silence I would try to turn down the volume on. My dry swallows become unbearably hearable.

Heartbeat. Heartbeat.

 

Silence

And then, just after those conversations start, a new silence comes and muddles out the heartbeat and swallowing silence. A certain kind of peace arrives, a clarity around the words being spoken, the truth of the people speaking the words. From the loud-heartbeat-silence I begin to hear the truth, and things quiet down.

The conversation has started: I can see where it will end.

The car is spinning off the road: I can tell I’ve lost all control.

A new kind of silence emerges.

A kind of chosen silence.

A kind of you-don’t-have-to-understand-me silence.

A kind of this-is-where-I-am silence.

This is who I am.

This is who you are.

This is where we are.

This is where we are not.

A kind of this-is-what-this-is silence.

 

 

 

djordan
Cape Town

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