Reluctant Pilgrim

Paris is for Lovers (photo: Enuma Okoro)

Paris is for lovers.

This is fitting,

because I am here for six weeks, to write yes,

but also aching to fall in love again

with my own heart.

I am here hoping to woo myself back to that childish curiosity for life.

I am here flirting with my delight in ordinary things

like walking,

and the scent of lavender

or the color of evening just before things get darker.

Things inevitably get darker.

I am here following the Seine somewhat aimlessly in the morning,

trusting the flow of open water,

of untamed spirit

will lead me to new clearings I can’t forsee.

I am here with permission to not feel guilty. I am so good at self-inflicted guilt.

I am here with an invitation to dwell,

to wake up with loose agendas, to relinquish control.

No matter how much that threatens my identity.

I am here with gratitude, knowing that all is gift and all is grace, and all I can do is give thanks

in the certain uncertainty of tomorrow.

I am here

aware that so few of us women can afford the time and the cost of getting away from our overflowing grasping lives.

But I am also here aware of how difficult it is to let ourselves receive any gifts of time and space,

to reacquaint ourselves with our own hearts, minds, desires, and thoughts,

aware that even letting go and living into freedom takes discipline.

Even lovers have to be disciplined.

I will practice the discipline of astonishment.

Here

In the city of love

I will practice falling back in love,

with life, with me,

and if I’m lucky,  with God.

She said once that the way we encounter others is somehow related to how we engage with God.

I hold that today.

In a mid afternoon conversation I sit across the table from what is holy, my head held in my hand, my arm bent, elbow slid across the wood top, listening intently as the image-bearer makes himself vulnerable, expressing sorrow between sips of a creamy latte.

I make myself present.

[You have heard it said that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.]

I listen to the fractured story of this one who houses God.

I lose purchase of my own fears, anxieties, vice-like clutching at what I want, to say, to do, to be.

I let things fall, empty hands, to catch the weight of his hesitant words.

He says, “Aren’t we all standing on holy ground?

Even me with my history of failures and daily temptations?

Aren’t we all called to say ‘yes’ when invited again and again to be more than the sum of our fears and our stutterings?”

And I nod slowly, with my own sorrow, with my own recognition of how hard it is to say that yes, to really believe that it is not all dependent on my self-generated efforts at goodness, or lost in my mishaps.

[You have heard it said that there is none good but one, that is, God. Why do you call me good?]

It is good, this sharing, this open acknowledgement of wrestling with our yeses, of dousing burning bushes, of tempering passions,

I say, “I have been angry. I do not know how to pray my way out of my anger.”

I say, “I am afraid of it spreading like illness.”

I say, “I fail God with my anger.”

I say, “Is this a way of saying no to God?”

He looks at me.

He listens to the fractured story of this one who houses God.

We are quiet in our confessions.

[You have heard it said that Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.]

He says, “Do not be quick to judge the anger.”

He says, ‘Be compassionate with it.”

He says, “Explore it. Look behind it and within it. First.”

Maybe this is an invitation.

I want to stutter yes.

We sit exposed,

grateful, humbled, present.

We dwell on this engaging with God.

Longing

I am cohabitating with Longing. I refuse to commit long-term. Secretly I am hoping to soon bump into the real thing.

And when I do I’ll come home, swing open the door of my house and declare loudly, “It’s over. It’s not me. It’s you.”

But until then I can’t quite let go of what I have- this longing that drapes itself confidently across my four-poster bed, my antique purple couch, my stitched up mending heart.

She is supple and strong but stretches out lazily as if every month is June.

I watch her.

I take her in, every slight movement that threatens to edge me out,

to push me beyond my repeatedly demarcated lines of what’s acceptable.

Longing can be horrid with boundaries.

It is odd but her presence reminds me to keep alert and open. To pay attention.

She leaves her things carelessly around the house.

The open journal.

The teasing scarf.

The more she takes over the clearer I am on what I work towards, pray towards, love towards.

And there is really a lot to be said for learning to live with her,

for a willingness to tolerate the discomfort, the lazy forcefulness of her.

There is a lot to be said for choosing to share my life space with her

without yet feeling the need to make peace.