On patience and prayer

Yes, the mountains over the weekend were lovely, but, as if to welcome me home, the mountains we face here put on a lovely show on Sunday evening: everywhere I looked there were glorious cloud formations to photograph.

I suppose it could be just that my spirit of appreciation had been awakened; that happens sometimes.  For me, it has a way of going dormant in winter, so that I just don't feel like photographing anything for months at a time, and then, all of a sudden, as if someone flipped a switch (and of course it has to do with the shift in the light) everything seems fresh and beautiful again.

I used to be terrified by those dormant periods: would I ever want to pick up my camera again?  But that of course is one of the gifts of age and experience: we come, in time, to understand that everything moves in cycles.

Failures and forgiveness move in a cycle, too: Richard Rohr, in his prayer this morning, refers to it as "the wondrous loop of your forgiveness and mercy."  And sometimes what it takes to stay in that loop is simply -- patience.

Patience to sit through the darkness, knowing that dawn will come.
Patience to sit through the winter, knowing that spring will come.
Patience to wait through the periods in life when God seems far away and zest and joy are only memories.
Patience to wade through the muck of life, trusting that eventually we will return to shore and find again the firm ground beneath our feet.

... and what sustains us, I think, is what Desmond Tutu calls the practice of prayer.  "We address God in the quiet of our hearts, in hymns and psalms, in dance and chant, with tears, with pleas, and with rejoicing.  Each day as I return to the practice of prayer I learn new ways to hear God.  Each day I learn new ways to address God."

Practice, in this case, will never make us perfect.  But it will help ease those long transitions from darkness into light.