We Will Know Spring
Get Expansive When Life Is Tedious
Beginning Monday 23rd February: Liturgies of the Wild UK Events
These signs keep popping up
Someone Walks With Us
So I’m trapped at Washington airport and I’m thinking about Jesus. Under the godless strip-lighting and amongst the sour churn of endlessly recycled air, he’s suddenly, surprisingly, present.
I don’t think Christ is a skulker, but he’s a spiritual-prowler when he feels like it. He gets about. He even gives shadows the jitters. His gaze can be direct, icon-bright, when it suits him, but he’s got periphery gaze going on too. I’d wondered if I’d glimpsed him a few days before when a Coyote kept pace during a California walk with an old friend.
Who are you, wanderer?
And I keep thinking about his first recorded miracle. His first sign. I try to remember what I’ve heard from my travel-addled memory. Ah yes, there was a wedding and wine.
Jesus spots Mary with the side-eye, urgent, smiling. Not my time yet mum. But mum is mum and we hate to dissuade our mothers. Awful feeling. And so Holy Time shifts a little, accelerates, to accommodate a son loving his mother. Maybe a berried drop of miracle falls onto Jewish dust, a drop of wine slipping past the sandals and astonished gasps. Into the earth. Onto Adam’s bones, Moses’, Naomi’s. All holy bones shift in the grit when the splash is splashed. Ivan Illich rubs some into his ink, Julian of Norwich into her tears, Hildegard into her ecstasies.
The wedding at Cana is on my mind at this bar in the airport of Dulles Washington. And dull it is. Agggh. Minutes before embarking for England, a flat, disinterested voice announces no flight for 4.5 hours. At least. My enquiry for other flights is met with a shrug, and swift departure from the podium. There’s an aircraft part that needs bringing up from New York. It could even be there’s no flight that night.
Stranded baby, stranded. But here and there, I can see Jesus mooching about. He tells me not to waste the tedium. Turn kronos time to kairos time.
I go to a bar in the midst of the chaos and loneliness.