“I meditate on what is great” – the opening lines of a song I’ve been taken by the past few weeks.
The end of a long work day, a frantic push to get something done on an impossibly tight timeline, the baton momentarily passed out of my hand. My son, the only child at home. A sun-kissed early spring evening, not-cold for the first time in memory, spring bulbs emerging in force. I could get more work done but I look up and see the sky shimmering, beckoning me. “Let’s go for a walk,” I suggest. He shrugs, “why not?,” following me out the door on my usual path through the neighborhood and around the back woods.
At the corner of our block we look up to see glowing puffs of clouds on parade, glistening from behind with creamy sunlight. We pause in admiration. “Let’s take one minute and look at the sky together and just enjoy it,” I offer. He takes my bid. I set a timer, set down my phone, put my arm around him. He leans in, lapping up the attention. We stand in silence for one minute. When it ends we look at each other and grin. Watching the sky together in silence becomes a surprisingly intimate act, moving me nearly to tears. Stopping to behold something bigger than me, allowing it to touch me, in another’s presence, feels extremely vulnerable to offer, and precious to receive. This is worth meditating on.
But its so much easier for the reverse to be true, especially lately. There is no shortage of grief within my actual circle of influence, let alone the broader world I care about. The default script of every neighborhood conversation these days seems to be:
How are you / fine, you
fine / actually terrible
yeah, same / can you believe the latest?
And then, we stew, nowhere else to go with our sorrow and rage, nothing we want to fixate on but unable to direct our minds elsewhere.
After some recent brutal development, I can’t even remember which one—the trauma of chaos makes it hard to keep track—my church small group gathered at our home, tired. Tired of the news, tired of things being so hard for so many, grieving yet another blow to vulnerable people, democratic institutions, the separation of powers.
As we sat to be with God together in quiet, as we do weekly, I felt a tug to invite us not to fixate on the obvious terrible things on our collective minds. Instead, my invitation was: Ask God to review with you the last day or two, to bring something to mind worth meditating on, something beautiful, lovely or good. Then hold that thing in your mind with God.
Beaten down as we were, everyone had something. Many of our beautiful moments involved animals—maybe when humanity is letting you down, another species is an easier place to love. We all felt a bit silly offering up our inconsequential moments of beauty, replete with cats and dogs, yet as we did, a palpable peace descended.
What’s the point? Why bother fixating on what is good, when there’s so much that’s not? What difference does it make? Cynicism is cool, and I notice my own mild embarrassment in advocating for a focus on the beautiful and good. It feels foolish, naive. Yet as real as ugly evil is, however spellbinding it may appear, I do not believe it is the ultimate reality. I don’t mean to say it should be ignored head-in-sand style, but perhaps a willful choice to hold to what is beautiful and good in the midst of what is broken is a way of reclaiming reality. Perhaps it helps you endure what is not good, even while it helps you persevere in imagining, and writing, a better story.
Once when making marmalade I left it alone too long; as the water evaporated, the sugars caramelized past the burning point, searing a black coating across the bottom of my stainless steel pan. It felt hopeless. But my husband stood patiently at the stove, steel wool in hand, scrubbing at the burnt layer. Slowly the scalded surface gave way to the original material, gleaming below, unchanged all along, just waiting for a strong and steady hand to recover it. Maybe hope, joy, beauty, which sound so fluffy and flimsy in the face of destruction, are actually tough and tenacious like steel wool, uncovering glimmers of the really-real, the gleaming stainless steel, shimmering through a messy blackened coating.
