
Lent continues! The guide I am following from SALT which uses the art of Matisse has assigned this week to the colors Blue and White– Jesus is transforming our hearts…where do you feel the ‘blues’ of sorrow? the dazzling white of transfiguration? This underlines for me that my spiritual journey contains both joy and sorrow, peace and panic, order and chaos, and that the Holy One is present in all and through all.
A hymn I have come to know in recent years lets me know of the paradoxical nature of the Holy–“peacemaker and sword bringer,…both gift and cost…” and “You the everlasting instant; you who are our pilgrim guide.” It is easy when my mood swings or spanners appear in the works or it seems that the world as gone off its axis in yet another dimension, that the Holy disappears. After a week glorious connection and truth telling and warmth comes a week of pouring rains, even snow here in Southern California, and missed appointments, broken appliances and rugs flying out from underneath. Where is the Holy then? My Lenten practice is to ground myself in the truth that even there, then, now the Holy is present in me, to me, for me.
All of that variety, change, unpredictability is at work in my transformation–the “blues” of conflict, brokenness and grief, and the dazzle of reconciliation, healing and consolation. Therefore, I need to put myself in the places of Grace, where I know I can be met, fed, comforted and made steady, as I have so many times before. Today as I go out meet the sun, to breath freshly washed air, to stretch my halting steps, to listen to the birds and breathe in the scents of the budding spring, I will remember that in the Blue and the White, God is there, and will never let me go.