Healing & Hope

Last week I wrote about Slowing Down.

This week, I practiced slowing down and stillness.

On Tuesday, I had a surgery I’ve been waiting for a long time. It marks the final step in my breast cancer journey, a reconstruction surgery to fix what can be fixed as a result of the two cancer surgeries and 27 rounds of radiation.

Healing requires slowing down, lying down, sleeping, and moving slowly with intention and care.

Today is also the first Sunday of Advent, the day we consider hope.

Beacause I am still healing I am sharing some of my favorite ponderings on hope, and considering what they mean for healing.

Photo by Mike Kotsch on Unsplash

I love the imagery of this invitation, “plant ourselves at the gates of Hope.”

• Where are you being invited to plant yourself in this season of Advent? (which is simply, a season of waiting and preparing.)

“Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.”

-Victoria Stafford in a book of essays called: The Impossible Will Take Awhile

What if we were on the look out this week for the “crumb trails” of hope is dropping from the “holes in it’s pockets."

“Hope”

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Hope has holes

in it’s pockets.

It leaves little

crumb trails

so that we,

when anxious,

can follow it.

Hope’s secret:

it doesn’t know

the destination-

it knows only

that all roads

begin with one

foot in front

of the other.

Listen to this delightful reading of “Hope” here.

And, just one more pondering on hope. What is hope like in your life?

I was just thinking

one morning

during meditation

how much alike

hope

and baking powder are:

quietly

getting what is

best in me

to rise,

awakening

the hint of eternity

within

I always think of that

when I eat biscuits now

and wish

that I could be

more faithful

to the hint of eternity,

the baking powder

in me.

-Macrina Wiederkehr in Seasons of Your Heart