I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.
All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.
I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
‘A Morning Offering’
John O’Donohue
To be honest, I am finding this Lent very difficult. To be honest, I am finding this year very difficult. My health has been bad, my head has been poorly, my spirit has been on the floor. I have been struggling for any balance, lurching from activity to activity with little sense of where I am going, only knowing I must make a priority for art therapy and counselling, often needing to cancel pretty much everything else.
I am back to clinging onto life with every scrap of energy I can muster.
And yet, in the midst of all that, I continue to choose to exert myself to create and craft material for this blog and the Lent group. I am hoping, almost against hope, that I will be led to somewhere God wants to show me, that I will be given just the right amount of energy I need for this day’s task.
Even in the midst of depression, I find myself continuing to teeter on the threshold of finding a way to live that is centred on the creativity I have been given. I feel I have been here for a long time: longing to explore new territories; feeling held back by old patterns and not knowing how to free myself from them. As I wait for knowledge of the Spirit’s unfolding, I endeavour to continue to place all that I am on ‘the altar of dawn’ every morning, risking the attempt to surrender all that I know, all I see, all I feel, all I have been, in order to encounter my Beloved.
And yet, despite these fine words, O’Donohue’s blessing challenges me: am I really willing ‘to risk being disturbed and changed’ - and on a daily basis? Am I willing to bless everything that comes to me as an invitation to worship the God who is infinitely bigger and stranger than I can possibly imagine?
O’Donohue recognises that each day, and each moment in each day, is a new threshold which I might cross to meet God. He describes these thresholds as places ‘where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness … a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit’.
In Benedictus, the collection from which the above poem comes, O’Donohue writes
“At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? … It is wise in your own life to be able to recognise and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross. …
To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging. …
It can free us into a natural courage that casts out fear and opens up our lives to become voyages of discovery, creativity, and compassion. No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a promise. Whatever comes, the great sacrament of life will remain faithful to us, blessing us always with visible signs of invisible grace. We merely need to trust.”
Will I?
invitation to invisible geography 1&2. Canon 7d. f13. 1/125. ISO 100.
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