A Sunday Contemplation

We have just finished our second month of contemplative Wednesday night services at church and in the middle of anxiety, fear, and anger, quiet, incense, and prayer may seem like an escape, or avoidance. I've found these past several weeks, though, that contemplation is necessary to keep a plumb line, to reorient my compass, to look, in the words of the prayer, to changlessness in the midst of chances and changes. To turn away others in need, because we have surrendered to fear, or to get lost in anger, even when in the sake of what is righteous, is still to be lost.

Thomas Merton:

“Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are words of His. But we are words that are meant to respond to Him, to answer to Him, to echo Him, and even in some way to contain Him and signify Him. Contemplation is this echo.”

Amen.

Slow

I have been watching slow things the long afternoon,
The thickening pad of snow out on the windowsill
That grows so slowly we can never see it grow
Although we say we can.  All that we know is that
It has grown and most probably will grow so long
As the snow falls.  And that is quite enough to know.
Then it will go and that will be a slow thing too
Whether it goes in sun or rain, whether a wind
Is or is not blowing. It always has been so.
And what is slower than this short, gray afternoon?
Slower than the way the sun, almost snowed in,
Begins by being low and ends by being low
And never sets or so it seems?  Such a slow sun.
Nor is there much to show for my long afternoon
Except perhaps that I've been growing I suppose.
Only the unremarkable growth that must be, though,
Which isn't much, Heaven knows, for anyone to show.

~ Robert Francis