There is no certainty... but the light

Resting in the light

I think most of us are attracted to light. The slant, the shine, the illumination that it gives to the darkened morning.

Darkness is such a mother to the light.

I work part-time as a chaplain in a prison, meeting many who live on the edges of our society. I was with an inmate recently who has been in prison most of his life - since he was an adolescent and now he is nearly an old man. He starts by saying to me, "Every morning I ask that I can stay alive".

 It is hard to imagine the darkness within a prison. It's not comprehensible for those of us who live outside.

This inmate is a tall man, his head mostly bowed but carrying a humble authority of a long-timer. He is respected. He says he has had a lot of time to think about his life while in prison.

Talking with him is a spacious affair, lots of time around his words, I feel inside of myself this immensity as if I am looking over a vast prairie, where I have no idea of the perspective. How has all that land been covered? what it must have taken, how those bits of light must have been woven in. I am aware of his footfall, peaks and troughs, over all the years. His sense of what this journey has asked, what he has not been able to do, and then what has evolved.

His will to survive, his continual fight with what lives inside of him. What crimes he has done, what thoughts he lives with, what he endured as a child.

He fights to want to live.

 Sitting with this man leaves me emptied - sanctified.

I think we all have small versions of this. The light seems not there, obfuscated by everything of such small value so that we cannot hear.

I like to think of this light as a something I can rely on if I calm down, take the pressure off my ego needs, become the practice, bear uncertainty. A sort of flow emerges, one pose unfolding into another. the breath belonging, and finding that I am in a sort of choir, with odd voices that are out of tune until something happens, and all parts seem to be lifted up together into some sort of harmony.

The great thing we learn, I believe, is that with our slow diligent work, a groundswell, a silence is being felt.

Then we know that the soul is being tended.

The mind now, not thinking in its usual restless disturbed way but in a way that is more like resting on and being fed from this great groundswell of soul.

Bless and love all of us who may have a life that walks so deeply in the dark.

All of us at some time will know such uncertainty.