Lingering

Do you have to let it linger?
The Cranberries

Three days after Ash Wednesday, there remain on my hands small places where I can still see traces of the ashes from that night. They linger.
The season of Lent is a bit about lingering, about slowing down, about listening intently for God’s voice in the rush and din of our day to day lives, about taking some time away from those lives to listen. Perhaps it is also about being willing to linger with some of our own experiences.
Not long ago, in Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus I came across Mitchell’s translation of the original version of Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy (p. 159). It is about lingering.

How dear you will be to me, then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
seasons of us, our winter-
enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,
where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

We need not search out difficult experiences nor suppose that God creates difficulty and pain so we can learn from it. Pain and difficulty will come. Joan Chittister puts it simply and well – “no one goes through life unscathed” (Called To Question, 224). What might we learn and how might we grow if we linger with such experiences, even if only for a while?

With Faith and With Feathers,

David