This morning as I jumped on I-40, I turned on my daily podcast, this time “Becoming Wise” with Krista Tippett, and listened to an interview with the writer, Pico Iyer, who says that the “Inner World is a great Undiscovered Terrain”.
In the introduction to the story, Krista asks him about the art of stillness about which he has written extensively over the years. He says, “Now, I just want to sit still for years on end really, charting that inner landscape because I think anyone who travels knows that you are not really doing so in order to move around, you are traveling in order to be moved, and really what you’re seeing is not really just the grand canyon or the great wall, but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life.”
This week we are continuing in the liturgy of our universe, with steps towards Joy and Celebration as the Easter-tide landscape invites us to imagine “more”. There are those of us who delight in a pragmatism of facts that provide the scope and sequence that outlines our lives and shapes what is seen and known. From this view, there are projected outcomes and life is full, yet calculated and understood, hoped for and yet empirically evidenced in what is both known and achievable. There are others of us for whom hope exists only in its most unknowable forms; the places inside ourselves that dreamers demand is full of reality and less of fantasy, and where outcomes are not valued for what they yield, but for the journey itself of the inner landscape. However, it is that your imagination is at play, or at odds, with the inner world.
My prayer for you today is that you will awaken to your own journey, traveling to be moved, listening to be stilled, or dreaming to be “woke”.
May the Love and Light of the Spirit lead the way,
Rev. Jenny Shultz-Thomas