fbpx
37.5 F
Spokane
Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeCommentaryHolding on in the letting go in a pandemic: Nature's Door

Holding on in the letting go in a pandemic: Nature’s Door

Date:

Related stories

My Journey through Homelessness Part Five: Learning to Live Outside the Box

The value of my homeless experience lies not so much in having learned how to live outside — at least not in the geographical sense. The value of my homeless experience lies in having learned how to live outside the box.

Lost in Translation: Isn’t It Time We Moved Beyond a Fear-Based Repentance?

When I hear the kingdom is at hand, followed immediately by the command to repent, the good news is overshadowed by the fear that I’m not good enough to be part of the kingdom of God.

Inspiring Others: How Our Marriage Turned 50

As we prepare to celebrate 50 years there are so many thoughts and memories going through my head. I have joked about how I don't know how you've put up with me for this long, which is really true in a sense with my Irish enthusiasm and temper.

Taking the Road ‘Less Traveled by’ Has Made ‘All the Difference’

Pete Haug remembers hearing Robert Frost read his poem "The Road not Taken" 65 years ago. It reminded him of his spiritual journey out of the Christianity of his youth into choosing the Baha'i faith as an adult.

Ask an EOC: Can You Confess in Private to God but not in Church Confession and be Forgiven?

Concerning the sacrament of Confession, Christ directly gave the authority to his Church to remit or retain the sins of the penitent. 

Our Sponsors

spot_img
spot_img

Holding on in the letting go in a pandemic: Nature’s Door

By Lace Williams-Tinajero

Nature compels me to enter its wild spaces. Green pastures on a hillside, sunlit skies in the morning and evening, purple-black-blue mountains — these offer glimpses of the divine.

Yet nature’s unpredictable landscape has a way of dismantling the clean lines kept between life and death, health and sickness, light and dark, the sacred and earthy.

In the wild, there is no either-or. Nature is both a shelter from and source of disaster. Lightning strikes a tree and obliterates its branches. A whale surfaces and the only signs of it being near are the whirlpools forming around my boat. A pack of feral dogs disappears down a trail and the lead dog chases after the one who has been warned never to run.

Things are going as planned until the blow of a diagnosis one day.

Is uncertainty the only certainty?

Nature has a way of cradling opposites in space and time, like two sides of the same hand. An unbroken horse must be tamed if it is to race. A pile of animal bones beneath a bush bursting with fresh huckleberries wasn’t there last season. This white heap of a once-living animal cries out a different story than the one I tell myself. Life is never completely safe.

Yet as long there is death there is the will to survive. Suffering and loss coexist with purpose. Just because a child cannot speak or hear, is he less human? If a child isn’t wanted, does she still matter?

If security is not readily found in others or in nature, it must be discovered in solitude. It makes no sense to put trust in something or someone that promises healing and deliverance yet is not there to protect in the first place.

Unless, that is, blame is placed at the wrong door.

What if the heart opens once again to love? Maybe, just maybe, something besides pain will follow this time.

Blindness and sight composed Bartimaeus’s heart song. He sat begging on the side of the road, crying out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” Then Jesus made him see.

Mystics claim that God’s essence remains unknowable even while God’s activity reveals who God is: Love. Centuries ago on Mount Athos, where only men are allowed, a group of monks claimed to have encountered the uncreated light of the Godhead by reciting the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Unbelievers questioned the truth of the believers’ claims.

Bartimaeus’s words two millennia ago prove timeless. For the monks on Mount Athos in the fourteenth century. For us today. For all. Forever. The hidden and revealed face of God abides in creation while setting it free.

Lace M. Williams
Lace M. Williams
Dr. Lace M. Williams has spent much of her life studying and seeking theological answers to the questions of what it means to be alive, to be human, to be made in the image of the Creator and to acquire beliefs and the language to express those beliefs. With B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in Scripture, Doctrine and Theology, Williams is interested in examining the biblical languages and writers through the lens of speech act theory. For fun, she spends time with her amazing son, her hero. For delight, she looks to the Triune God, loved ones and nature.

Our Sponsors

spot_img
spot_img
spot_img

4 COMMENTS

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
4 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
trackback

[…] Read Part 1 in this series here. […]

trackback

[…] Part 1 and Part 2 in this […]

trackback

[…] Read Part 1 and Part 2  and Part 3 in this series […]

trackback

[…] Read Part 1 and Part 2  and Part 3 and Part 4 in this series […]

spot_img
4
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x