A couple of years ago, I was driving home from my great uncle's funeral. My mother and I had visited him in the hospital and he had always been a character; laying in the bed while complaining that there were no pretty nurses to look at. My mother, as we were getting ready to leave, asked him when the doctors might be releasing him "When do you think you will be going home?" He paused and shook his head firmly. "Tuesday, Tuesday I'm going home." We left with the resolve that Mother would come back on Tuesday to take him back home where he lived with his sister, my aunt.
The Creator however, had other plans.
I battled with my emotions on that car ride home from his funeral. You see, this was my mother's uncle..she was closer to him than I had been up until the time I had become an adult so I really only knew him briefly but I had mourned the lost of one of my elders, who although so different and perhaps a little crass, was fiercely dedicated to our extended family. Alone and silent as I headed towards the expressway, I looked up to the beautiful skies before me and somehow, in those majestic, massive cloud formations Creation sang out into the depths of my being and somehow I knew..and I wept almost all the way home.
The Lenten season is supposed to be one of sorrow, and of meditation and perhaps if Creation did not come skipping over the horizons in all of Her radiance then I would at the moment be quiet, withdrawn and morose.
Instead, the seasons come through the rolling waves of the dawn bringing with them the healing light, awakening the Earth with song and with harp. We find ourselves wishing that our wonderful professors would take our classes outside; we escape to the sereneness of our back porches, happily reading everything in every last syllabus soaking in Life as the sun and the sweetness of the winds would allow.
Yet, news of dear friends and how life has seemed to pause for them: a good friend whose daughter was injured in a car accident; extended family whose mother is succumbing to a disease; a prayer request lifted for a young woman who is battling another brings the Lenten season once more into the palms of our hands.
As I cast my gaze outward to the afternoon and to the calling of chimes rocking in the arms of afternoon breezes I am reminded that we are always in tune with the rhythm of Creation even in those times where the soft, slow reaching of the violin which tugs at our sadness and we strain under the weight of questions-why? why her? why now?
The valley rolls our before us as the roads intertwine from where we all journey from. It remains close enough so that we are able to stand in the falling showers of baptism and remember God's promise to us. This day is beautiful, and knowing that whether we bask in the brilliant sunlight of a Wednesday afternoon or opening our gaze to the glorious Life beyond the veil, comforted that the Creator travels with each of us makes me thankful and continued prayerful for the life ahead.
Lape Bondye, God's Peace.
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