Lately I have finished
Water my Soul: Cultivating the Interior Life, a spiritual devotional based upon the imagery of cultivation, by poet Luci Shaw. Shaw's writing style is quite close to the "Christian Living" writings of Madelience L'Engle. The two, in fact, were great friends and often conducted writing seminars together.
An excerpt from th chapter, "Growing in the Light":
"I join in our universal human longing to be with God, to have all my unsatisfied longings fulfilled:
Unless I am mistaken
'All of us wait for this--
To jettison the grasping hands
To lope through new-created lands
Where
hope and
have may kiss.'
Perhaps the growing seed wonders if it will ever pierce through the skin of soil and sod and burst into the light. This is, for me, a parable of the life of faith. It is across the gulf between the
wanting and the
having that faith carries us. Our belief in a God who is good, who understands our yearnings, who teaches us much by making us wait, and who will untimately reward our upward struggle, allows us to persevere, to persist. As the author of
The Cloud of Unknowing challenges us: 'Smite upon the thick cloud of unknowing wth the sharp dart of longing love; come what may, never give up.'"
Delighted sigh.
