A Lament for our Times 6/2020
A typical Post-Soviet stairwell – photo courtesy of Rachel Duggins
The ins and outs, attics and basements, the sunrooms, porches and junk drawers of our souls…The places we mourn.
Where tears are shed, dreams are led, regrets embed into closets and drawers – a potpourri of impressions, leanings, voices and choices…
Choices to hide for a time, to glide, to ride, to chide and to side with what we deem good and right. Choices to go and come, to reach to give and reach to take. Wishing to re-do, un-do, over-do what’s done. Or to re-mark things marked unremarkable.
Traversing soul. In the place where the files are, the intricate memories and defining points, the horrors and rifts way beneath the surface. Where grace proffered by the graced, by the disgraced, the chaffed is what heals. That’s deep grace when offered by one who has deeply received it.
Have you traversed your soul into that deep grace place? Where you know you don’t deserve it, you may not believe you can get to it and can’t bear the thought of freely taking it? Or the thought of giving it? It’s long and winding, windy and grinding, mundane and sublime, the way to the inner reckoning and freeing, of being and becoming. Where we turn to You alone who keeps us in life, for there is hope nowhere else.
“It is through Him that we become familiar with the inmost secrets of our own selves. And only they who habitually live this hidden and sunken life of solitary and secret communion will ever do much in the field of outward work. Christians of this generation are far too much accustomed to live only in the front rooms of the house, that look out upon the street; and they know very little-far too little for their soul’s health, and far too little for the freshness of their work and its prosperity-of that inward life of silent contemplation and expectant adoration, by which all strength is fed.”
From MacLaren’s expositions on John 10 https://biblehub.com/commentaries/john/10-9.htm
How is your habit of hidden communion with your Source?
