Several have asked I post the meditation that I wrote that was published in St. John’s meditations. Thank you for the nice comments. Webb
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing: wait without
love
for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. T.S. Elliot
In the quiet of our Lenten meditations we wait and we listen for God’s guidance in our lives. T.S. Elliot’s suggests that we wait without any thought of what will come. An expert in meditation can probably accomplish this easily, but in the quiet of my room my brain quickly fills with the very thoughts T.S. Elliot warns – hope and love of the wrong things.
David Whyte, in his work The Heart Aroused, Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, suggests that if we have little idea on what we really need to continue on our road to God that we learn to say a firm no to those things we know will lead to loss of vitality. He calls it the via negativa the discipline of saying no when we have as yet no clarity about those things to which we can say yes. He believes that in the continued utterance of no is the profound faith that the yes will appear. Whyte says we create an energetic vacuum into which something we recognize can appear. Eventually appearing like an old and loving memory, it becomes more recognizable and real for its long absence.
Many of us during Lent say no to something. For forty days we unwittingly travel the via negativa. For others like T.S. Elliot, Lent may simply be a time when we learn to wait without hoping or loving the wrong thing. The Lenten season offers many paths, but each journey leads us to a clarity of God’s will for each and every one of us, and how may we bud and blossom in God’s time.
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