The morning dawned gray and hard. Freezing rain fell the night before and the branches of the trees and shrubs were encased in an icy sheath. Had the morning been sunny, those same branches would have sparkled in the sun’s rays, shafts of light igniting the rainbow flames locked in the ice … but not today. In the gray morning, the ice on the long needles of the white pine and the delicate, peeling branches of the Seven Sons’ Tree held invisible rainbows in the shadowed crystals, but I was content, mindful of the possibility of beauty hidden within, waiting only for a shaft of light to release it.

Over that past six months I have been staring into the hard gray of illness, wondering what, if anything to do with life, waited within. Since last October, I have been fighting a rare cancer that has required surgery and extensive chemo. In the weeks ahead, I will undergo a stem cell transplant. Along the way I have been graced with many moments of kindness and compassion. I felt the love of family and friends sustaining me through it all, each expression an embodiment of God’s presence in a scary and unholy time, each expression making a small crack in the hard reality of cancer, revealing a small flash of a rainbow of hope

Along the way, however, there have been searing moments when the only light visible was the iridescent glow of the chemo bag hanging in the darkness of my hospital room. Dark nights that were more than chronological but spiritual and emotional. Being mindful of the presence of God becomes a challenge in such times – in the dark times we have all had – but a challenge that pushes us to a wider understanding of what it means to be mindful of the Divine in those moments.

Mindfulness is a practice that is encouraged by all those seeking to deepen their spiritual life. Those of us seeking God, or an experience or the numinous, the holy, the sacred are advised to behold the world around us, to look for the face of the divine and hints of heaven in the moment. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,” thus people speak about spectacular sunrises, mountaintop vistas, soaring music, and the newborn’s face. These moments, as glorious as they are, are not the whole story. It is true creation can bring us to our knees, overwhelming us with such awe and grandeur, but the world can also push us down, overwhelming us with feelings despair and helplessness. Our practice of mindfulness falls short if we don’t include the latter as a place to experience God.

The world can be a place of terror, tragedy and personal trial. No wonder we rightfully grasp at moments of beauty and peace to reassure us of the presence of the Holy … of the Good. Such moments provide respite from the onslaught, but we need more in the midst of the onslaught. I need more, and the story of Easter offers it to me, it gives me a glimpse of the presence of God in the midst of suffering.

Whether you take the story literally or understand it as an archetypal metaphor, or somewhere in between, it tells a wider truth about life. You don’t have to be a believer. We have all had moments of crucifixion, times of entombment with no way out, times of sorrow and hopelessness. And we have also experienced our own resurrections, when against all odds we have been raised up and made whole. Some light has broken through and transformed the darkness into something hopeful, something promising. To me, that is the light of Easter morning, the light that shattered the stone and transformed death.

I am mindful that the gray ice on the trees needs only a ray of sunlight to release the beauty within. I am mindful that the darkness I experience through this disease needs only the light of Easter, which is not limited to one Sunday a year but is there all the time, to release the beauty of hope. And God is, indeed, present in it all.

Janet Dorman is the pastor at Foreside Community Church. She can be reached at revjkdsf@yahoo.com


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