Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap and trivial?
Mary Oliver
I sense that I am drawing near to the heart of my Advent journey. As I remind myself to just sit and be in the face of the Mystery I cannot possibly comprehend, Advent’s themes of alertness, expectation and waiting become pertinent once again.
The voice of Isaiah thunders ‘Prepare The Way’ in my ears and I begin to sense that something deep within me is becoming, shifting, into a different pattern. I feel I might be approaching the threshold of my next season of ‘becoming’ - becoming more like God, becoming more like the Kate I was created to be.
Most of the time I despair that I cannot see, hear or sense anything, physically or spiritually, and certainly no sign of holiness as I stumble over the same mistakes time and again; yet when I am able to sense these thresholds approaching and being crossed, I think again of the word ‘unfurling’ which I have used over the past eight years to describe my gradual movement toward God.
This is a movement undertaken in infinitesimally small steps, seemingly going round and round in circles, but I am convinced that just as God’s geometry created the spiral in the rose and the sunflower, so am I on that journey towards the Gift.
One of my favourite painters, Henri Matisse wrote that “there are always flowers for those who want to see them”. I come to the next threshold, enter the next season, turn again into the next spiral of the labyrinth and fix my eyes as often as I can on the One who moves me, being hugely grateful whenever I glimpse the Treasure.
Thank God there are always flowers.
Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald fawn,
The earth’s whole amplitude and Nature’s multiform power
consign’d for once to colors;
The light, the general air possess’d by them - colours till now unknown,
No limit, confine - not the Western sky alone - the high meridian -
North, South, all,
Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.
‘A Prairie Sunset’
Walt Whitman
one secret of light. iPhone image.
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