Returning
By Andrea Lingle
For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. But you refused. Isaiah 30:15
It should be simple to return home. Honestly, it should be simple to do a lot of things that aren’t simple. Running into the grocery store for one thing. Reading a story to your children. Sitting down for a moment of contemplative writing. These things should be simple.
Lent should be simple too. A time of reflection and repentance. Whatever is in there, name it and get it out. But it isn’t simple because I don’t know what is in there.
I can’t see me.
I can see my stomach, a bit scarred and soft from the fullness of life. I can see my legs, crossed in my writing chair, supporting my computer. I can see my hands, thick and squarish and clever, like my dad’s. I can see the bridge of my nose. But I cannot see me. The me that wonders if I did my best. The me that tried so hard to meet your eyes but failed. The me that desperately wants to make you proud. Do you see me?
In Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which I am reading through this Lenten season, Rovelli says this:
“It seems to me, that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction.”
It is not the nouns in the I-Thou relationship that make us who we are. It is the hyphen. I become I as I interact with thou (whomever you may be).
There is a man on the hill facing my writing chair who is playing with his dog. The dog is bounding and bowing in the abundant glory of a rare warm and sunny February afternoon. They are too far away for me to see their eyes or faces, but there is joy on that hill. They, the man and the dog, play together, and thereby, create each other moment by moment. Can that possibly be true? We are unfolding each moment as we encounter the other?
I am not sure that I want this particular thing to be true. After all, Rovelli was talking about Quantum Mechanics, and what is true for the electron is not, necessarily, true for me. I am made of electrons, but I am not identical my electrons. I don’t think.
There was a father whose son ventured far from home with pockets lined with the father’s money. He forgot for a moment that he was a son. There, far from home, the son learned something about the world: it could be unkind. He had forgotten for a moment that he was a son. After the glittering lights and the pig sty, he retuned home. He was met on the road, and in that moment, he remembered he was a son. In returning, he was saved.
To return is to be saved—to find our way back to the other is to be remade again. In love, in joy, in resentment? What will it be? How will I meet you? How will I be met? To be saved is to be kept from annihilation, and to encounter the other is to call the other into being.
One of my aching questions is why I return to liturgical spaces of faith in the face of doubt. We have been taught that if you can doubt something, it loses credibility, and, if we are honest, there isn’t much that passes that test. There are so many reasons to give it up. Death, division, disappointment. Perhaps I should let the sound of the organ fade into the oak paneling, let the candles burn down until their wicks fail, let the bread and cup grow stale.
But there is the barest hint of something that meets me in the lines of prayer and song and litany and doubt, and in my return, week after week, I, too, am made new.
Writing Practice Prompts:
In the space between us…
The things I see in you…
What I brought with me…
In that patch of sunlight…
Everything I know about sweaters…
In returning I found…
Everything I can see of me:
Not sure how Writing Practice works?