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Emptiness discomfits me, snaps at my innards, and scrapes barnacles from my imagination while the sun-drenched afternoon toasts new budding on the snowflake viburnum outside my study window.
As a solitary dog-walker trudges up the hill, her chest heaving, a creeping barrenness unravels my grasp of life’s fabric.
I sit in my wing-back chair, close my eyes, and wait, uneasy and surrendered. Imperceptibly, a new courage emboldens me to listen. From the emptiness, an ineffable sense of the Sacred emerges, a whispering not found in human discourse or books.
This is something else.
It hurts: one of the faces of grief, united with the Ukrainians’ plight, the world over.
Yet, a wise potter once said, “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds what we want.”
From the distance, they watched a bloodied pulp, two-inch thorns squashed into his head, lugging a crossbeam over his shoulder, its end zigzagging a dusty trail up a steep hill. Hecklers, spitters, and garbage throwers, exacerbated the mayhem. Spiteful crows cawed, circling above the coming feast.
There were women watching, a handful as far as we know, their veiled heads shielding the noon sun, their dark eyes stinging with dry pain, their revulsion provoking gags. Perhaps men stood further away and gripped their guts.
Today, others are also watching—not just a handful but the planet Earth: you and me, our neighbors, everyone feels the atrocities meted upon the Ukrainians, people like ourselves wanting a peaceful, productive life. Such watching bores deep trenches of psychic powerlessness, of frenzy toward the Evil threats lobed upon us, in the fourth week of conflict.
Like those watching the Man of Sorrows on that barren hillside—He has been there—prayer permeated their angst. So not to lose heart …
I sit in my wing-back chair, the Jerusalem Bible open upon my lap.
Earlier, I shuddered with media reports of Russians firing long range missiles at Kyiv, Karkiv, and Mariupol and more killing of civilians; with phone conversations blistering the wires between France’s Macron and Putin and between Biden and Xi Jinping.
Still another day of Russian mind control: the existence of biolabs and Nazis in Ukraine that justifies their aggression.
Yet, another day of Ukrainian resistance remains in place, with its demands for security guarantees from Russia, should it not join NATO.
Such terror-rhetoric glistens with menace, its intent to foist global panic: Ukrainians’ devastation could become the lot of other nations, including our own.
Such issues scathe my depths like zillions of flashing daggers. If unaddressed, psychic dismemberment occurs. I choose not to go there.
Instead, I enter within the psalmist’s imperative, Seek his face (27:8)—a redirection toward Spirit where, alone, faith stirs and stretches tall.
Like gardeners harvesting seeds of spent flowers, I collect my scattered energies and focus upon the present moment in which the face of God abounds. Today, I pray to be teachable, to live with events, terrifying and unpredictable as they unfold, fraught by Evil’s illusion.
We’re in good hands and always have been.
Heart Whisperings 