A simple post tonight as I am very tired from two full days of teaching. Our first session of Awakening the Creative Spirit was wonderful with twelve holy women participating.
This first session focused on an overview of all the arts and we had everyone use a collage process to focus on the question “What does your soul long for?” Such richness revealed in that exploration. As I made mine, a very simple one weaving together images of rootedness and the flow of ocean, I was tempted to add more images to it. But, it felt done with all that spaciousness and simplicity. While working two scripture quotes kept stirring in me, and I went down the hall to borrow a bible and was given a New Jerusalem translation. I found the quotes and something about reading them in their different translation I discovered more newness in the words and they touched something deep within me:
Now I am revealing new things to you
Things hidden and unknown to you
Created just now, this very moment.
Of these things you have heard nothing until now.
So that you cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this.
-Isaiah 48:6-7
Yahweh says this:
Put yourselves on the ways of long ago
Enquire about ancient paths:
Which was the good way?
Take it then, and you shall find rest.
-Jeremiah 6:16
Something about the tension between standing on “ancient paths” and recognizing that God is continuously creating new things “just now this very moment,” expressed another layer of this sense I have of living in border spaces. I have been having dreams about this as well that I will explore more later this week.
I have this sense of being grounded deeply in the ancient ways, especially Benedictine and Celtic paths, and at the same time being called to always recognize the newness God invites me, all of us, to at every moment. Newness we had not even imagined until this very second.
Can you see it, just there beyond the edges of your perception?
And what are the ancient ways that call you to your very depths?
-Christine Valters Paintner