Reflections of a Harried Pilgrim

The word of the Indigo Girls.

Thanks be to God.

I wonder, God, if you ever look down from way up there and notice me, what you see.  Do your eyes (metaphorically, of course) dart after this harried, frantic, sometimes desperate pilgrim?

I am trying, trying to sit, still, quiet for once, all the trying and succeeding and failing, paused for just a moment to be still.  But then, immediately, I wonder if I ever be truly empty, still?  Because, I think anxiously almost the very instant the silence falls, if I say nothing, ask nothing…if I am not producing anything…where is my value?

A radical thought creeps in.

I notice it there, on the very edges: what if you see me still, unproducing even, and think with tender compassion: Beloved!

And I wonder something even more crazy.  What if even in the silence…perhaps ONLY in the silence…there is important work to be done?  Hard work.  Work worthy of one who is beloved of God.

So, God, if you can contain your surprise, I wonder if you would help me do the work of the silence and stillness, that work that I cannot seem to do in my best moments of striving and pushing and trying so hard.

Form and change and reach for me as long as you can keep my attention, so that when the trying and succeeding and failing starts again, maybe, just maybe this pilgrim will be a little less frantic.

And maybe tomorrow in the stillness I’ll rest for a little bit longer, breathless with trying yet again, on the shores of the one who said from the beginning and keeps saying, over and over: Beloved.