On the failings of my feet
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So for my YASC class, in terms of locations, Brasilia is the farthest from an ocean, over 100 miles further inland than Paris, France, and double that of Dodoma, Tanzania from the coast, and clearly beating any spot in Haiti, Japan, the Philippines, and other island nations and port cities. So this Florida girl has been seriously limited on beach time this year. However, lately, the ocean has certainly been on my mind. Mostly because I'm being haunted by another song again.
It's a song I sang last summer at DaySpring around the campfire with an especially fond memory from the final week of first session. Everything seemed a little extra difficult that week. The staff had been together for 3 straight weeks, which is always a recipe for frustrations and eye rolls, and we had been on call 24 hours a day for homesickness, literal sickness, disagreements, just plain weirdness, and the usual host of Florida spider/cockroach/silverfish/lizard issues that tend to send campers (and some of the counselors, too) screaming and running. But that moment, at the end of all that, was perfect.
It's a song we discussed and hummed alongside the edge of the Hudson river at the edge of the monastery in New York later that same summer as I attended YASC training. It and the waves on the pebbled riverbed were the backdrop to our conversations of excitement and fears and building friendships as the monks up the hill kept the Holy Silence starting at 8:30pm, and I, for one, found the allure of conversation with other Episcopal millennials too slim a chance to miss.
And it's a song I heard here in Brazil, just a week or so ago, playing on the phone of one of my friends at church. And again the other day on a music streaming site, even though the channel was supposedly unrelated. It seemed especially fitting since my feet have been failing me, big time. This has been a relatively new thing in the past few weeks, but it's the soles of my feet. Some days I wake up and every touch, any pressure put on them feels like walking on legos, for lack of a better explanation. This compounds the join pain in my knees and hips that I was already very well aware of. My feet have failed, and not because I'm trying to walk on water.
And yet, while it is the tag line of the song, and featured on a lot of pictures and posters and album images, that lyric really doesn't fully explain the message of the song.
It is only in the lines following that opening, that it is somewhat explained why feet MUST fail.
True sorrow, true depression, true life-shaking fear, is what truly gets us to God...cause we, as a general opinion I hold, are a stubborn lot when it comes to faith, belief, and allowing entrance to the divine, and thus the mystery of grace and reconciliation brought with it, into our very midst in the present moment. Peter's feet failed all those years ago, and despite all that's changed about the world since then, that tendency in humankind doesn't really seemed to have shifted.
I have felt true hunger, and crippling anxiety, and fear, and self-loathing and despair that sunk me to depths of darkness where my feet, my faith, and my hope have failed. And it is in those places and those bitter moments of faith that it has, unequivocally, without fail, lovingly, been the still small voice and presence of Jesus that has called me back, or calmed me down, or nourished me, or just been present as the human experience took its toll, just like He was for Peter.
I am not, as a Christian, ever to be exempt from those hardships, for not even Jesus was, but I will always have Him, and--if we're all together and doing it right--I will have other members of the family of God there, too. Sometimes to add joy, or love, or wisdom, or blessings, but other times just to be a presence sitting, waiting it out calmly beside me: a reminder of the joy, love, wisdom, and blessings in my past, and of those to come.
Because, without sometimes sitting in darkness, how will we ever know the joy when we've seen a great light?
So for my YASC class, in terms of locations, Brasilia is the farthest from an ocean, over 100 miles further inland than Paris, France, and double that of Dodoma, Tanzania from the coast, and clearly beating any spot in Haiti, Japan, the Philippines, and other island nations and port cities. So this Florida girl has been seriously limited on beach time this year. However, lately, the ocean has certainly been on my mind. Mostly because I'm being haunted by another song again.
It's a song I sang last summer at DaySpring around the campfire with an especially fond memory from the final week of first session. Everything seemed a little extra difficult that week. The staff had been together for 3 straight weeks, which is always a recipe for frustrations and eye rolls, and we had been on call 24 hours a day for homesickness, literal sickness, disagreements, just plain weirdness, and the usual host of Florida spider/cockroach/silverfish/lizard issues that tend to send campers (and some of the counselors, too) screaming and running. But that moment, at the end of all that, was perfect.
It's a song we discussed and hummed alongside the edge of the Hudson river at the edge of the monastery in New York later that same summer as I attended YASC training. It and the waves on the pebbled riverbed were the backdrop to our conversations of excitement and fears and building friendships as the monks up the hill kept the Holy Silence starting at 8:30pm, and I, for one, found the allure of conversation with other Episcopal millennials too slim a chance to miss.
And it's a song I heard here in Brazil, just a week or so ago, playing on the phone of one of my friends at church. And again the other day on a music streaming site, even though the channel was supposedly unrelated. It seemed especially fitting since my feet have been failing me, big time. This has been a relatively new thing in the past few weeks, but it's the soles of my feet. Some days I wake up and every touch, any pressure put on them feels like walking on legos, for lack of a better explanation. This compounds the join pain in my knees and hips that I was already very well aware of. My feet have failed, and not because I'm trying to walk on water.
And yet, while it is the tag line of the song, and featured on a lot of pictures and posters and album images, that lyric really doesn't fully explain the message of the song.
It is only in the lines following that opening, that it is somewhat explained why feet MUST fail.
True sorrow, true depression, true life-shaking fear, is what truly gets us to God...cause we, as a general opinion I hold, are a stubborn lot when it comes to faith, belief, and allowing entrance to the divine, and thus the mystery of grace and reconciliation brought with it, into our very midst in the present moment. Peter's feet failed all those years ago, and despite all that's changed about the world since then, that tendency in humankind doesn't really seemed to have shifted.
I have felt true hunger, and crippling anxiety, and fear, and self-loathing and despair that sunk me to depths of darkness where my feet, my faith, and my hope have failed. And it is in those places and those bitter moments of faith that it has, unequivocally, without fail, lovingly, been the still small voice and presence of Jesus that has called me back, or calmed me down, or nourished me, or just been present as the human experience took its toll, just like He was for Peter.
I am not, as a Christian, ever to be exempt from those hardships, for not even Jesus was, but I will always have Him, and--if we're all together and doing it right--I will have other members of the family of God there, too. Sometimes to add joy, or love, or wisdom, or blessings, but other times just to be a presence sitting, waiting it out calmly beside me: a reminder of the joy, love, wisdom, and blessings in my past, and of those to come.
Because, without sometimes sitting in darkness, how will we ever know the joy when we've seen a great light?
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