The plunge into sub-zero temperatures this week has me thinking about ice.
Some of my favourite skating was on a small pond at a horse farm that was part of our neighbourhood – before it was sold and a sub-division went in. There was something really special about gliding across the glassy surface and being able to see the life going on below.
No one wants to be on a body of frozen water and hear the cracking of ice underneath their blades. It is scary and alarming and causes our heart rate to increase exponentially.
In the same way, when we sense/hear/feel the cracking of what we once thought we knew to be true, it is just as scary.
But what if the cracking of entrenched ideas leads to a more beautiful truth, a deeper understanding, and the goodness of all creation is enhanced?
A playwright, Christopher Fry, once wrote:
Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,
the thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to face us everywhere,
never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul humanity ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
“Exploration into God.” I love that phrase.
Exploration into God is tricky because each of us has our own portrait of God. Ice breaking into exploration of God opens our hearts to new ways of thinking which include learning, compassion, understanding, humility, generosity, forgiveness of self and others, empathy, mercy, pausing to listen to what the other side is saying beneath the words, giving voice to those whose voices have been silenced.
I have been lucky enough only once to see the ice break up on a river. It is a powerful thing – the ice creaking, moaning, and then cracking up into huge thick slabs. The sun sparkling on the water as it rushes past. But other melts are like slowly dripping icicles, or the lake at the cottage that just slowly turns to slush which the wind pushes onto the shore.
This ice thing is an apt metaphor for our spiritual lives. Exploration into God can be like riding an ice chunk down a swollen river, or it can be like part of us is still frozen and part is beginning to break open, or we can simply be in a slow drip.
It is no small thing we do. It is soul size.
Blessings, Kathi
