I’ve been on a bit of a run this last while, writing about my experience at the midweek contemplative service at Saint Andrew’s. This entry is no different…written because the fullness I feel is more than I can hold inside.

Last night I arrived wearing sunglasses. After finding the way to my chosen seat, there was a moment of exchange when I was without any lenses at all. In that brief space, I looked up to the large stained glass window and the three lit pillar candles in front. Stunning! Blurry as anything–like a big private showing of Monet’s finest…but wow, it was spectacular. The light and the colours softened into a wholeness…there were no edges…only overlap and expansion out beyond leaded borders and the reach of a wick.

Clarity was soon restored with the unfolding of temples and donning of unshaded spectacles…And yet, I kept looking over the top of the ophthalmological wonder that is a set of progressive lenses. There was an unanticipated comfort in the lack of clarity.

Funny thing, that sensation seemed to go with both readings of the evening. Romans 8:22-27 includes ‘sighs too deep for words’ and somehow sighs seem fuzzy edged. There isn’t much that’s crisp about a sigh…it’s the choice of expression when the finer edges of language don’t suffice. When precision of thought has perhaps gone wandering…all feeling, all hope, the whole of what and who and how and questions of why and when…they are all in the sigh without boundary, the expansive space where so much is held.

Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘The Ponds’ was the other reading. In part, she says this:

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled–
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing–
that the light is everything–that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

If that isn’t a poetic sigh…

To be dazzled, to cast aside the weight of facts and float a little…I want to believe I am looking into a great mystery…that light is everything, more than the sum…And I do. AUGH… Yes… permission to sigh and believe in what is beyond the immediate, what is beyond the clarity of the individual segments of here and now… Because, who hopes for what is seen? (Romans)…

How I love this Wednesday space that allows for setting aside clarity’s clamour and invites instead a spacious quiet to enfold…Where the Spirit can move freely and remind me that this space surrounding me is an interior space within me as well…another blurring of duality. Another sigh saying yes, go ahead…believe.

And I do. I do.