Living Tree Poetry

“For although he is right with us and in and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.”
Thomas Merton

Each moment contains a hundred messages from God. For every cry of “Oh God!” He answers a hundred times “I am Here!”
Rumi

Don’t expect to arrive at a place of knowing.
You are on the road of discovering, my friend,
and the flame in your heart
will only inconstantly let you know
that there also walks the Beloved…”
Steve Garnaas Holmes

“A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, ‘I can’t prove a thing, but there’s something about His eyes and His voice. There’s something about the way He carries His head, His hands, the way He carries His cross – the way He carries me.”
Frederick Buechner

“…Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, and opening the scriptures to us?”
Luke 24: 32

My Prayer today is for seeking Him.  Awareness is inconstant.  We cannot hold our attention.  It moves outward and inward like the tides.  It turns both towards the darkness and the light in us –  we sway between selfishness and generosity, rigidity and flexibility; between fear and confidence, and thoughts of lack or plenty.  We are human and as Steve Garnaas Holmes reminds us we are not meant to arrive at a place of full ‘knowing’, or as Thomas Merton reflected, ‘he is right with us’ but ‘we have to go on journeys to find him’.  We remember the bible verse, ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’  (1 Cor:13:12) For we see him right now through a mirror, whose image is determined by the light or darkness with which we look for him.  A reflection is only visible in a mirror when the light hits it, and as we dance between the light and dark in ourselves we see him and then we don’t, although always we are always aware on some level that he is there.  My prayer today is that we might intentionally seek the one who has never left us, knowing that from time to time we will find him, sometimes even being floored by his radiance, while at other times we might feel an absence, as though he were on the other side of that dark curtain, not far at all but too far for the weak light in us to illuminate.

Ah but he’s here.  For me often, just the awareness of that is encouragement enough.

These are drawn from daily prayers and reflections I write my Chaplaincy colleagues.