Excerpt:
A SICK CHILD The postman comes when I am still in bed. "Postman, what do you have for me today?" I say to him. (But really...
I have been feeling very fragile, debilitated, depleted, and weak. Weary. Sometimes, when I'm emotionally and spiritually exhausted, I get into a sleep pattern where I'll go to bed at 8 and wake at 4 or even 3 in the morning and start my day, which is to say I'll have my coffee and pray. The hours of early morning are the only time I'm able to get the deep silence and solitude my spirit craves.
As Thérèse of Lisieux writes in The Story of a Soul:
"One day one of my teachers at the Abbey school asked me what I did on my days off when I was alone. I replied that I would go behind my bed into an empty space that was there and that was easy for me to shut off with the curtain, and there, I would think.” “But what do you think about?” she said. “I think about God, about life. . . . about ETERNITY, I just think!"
We think and then we reach the limits of thought and our hearts cry out in anguish at all our limitations, not least of all our inability to abandon ourselves completely, to let the hell go, to rest. We do toil for the bread we eat, in every sense of the word bread, and every sense of the word toil.
Still, sometimes exhaustion can be a gift. When we're too tired to work up a head of steam about our usual anxieties, resentments, and obsessions, new ideas can come in sideways. The other day, out walking, for example, I thought, I wonder if heaven if there's another color, a new color, a color beyond or outside the colors we know on earth. Wouldn't that be wild? Think of it: no human being can imagine or create a color other than the colors we already have.
Maybe there is such a color. And maybe it's thinking of us!
-Heather King
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