To create the black and white version I had to remove the “saturation” of color. I find that interesting.

Last week, while talking to a group about grief, I used the metaphor of reading the Bible, poetry, or even praying. We tend to read with such a rush to get the point, to read the final line, or to hear the Amen and proclaim it is done. We mindlessly speed to the end and we miss the beauty woven in the beginning and middle creating the end. I used the example of the 23rd Psalm which they all knew. What if, instead of rushing to the end, we just read in bits the first few words, removed the saturation of color and noticed the stark power of meaning in the details. “The Lord IS.” “The Lord is MY.” What if we just read those three or four words and lost ourselves not only their meaning but their promise? The point is, I told them, we miss the gifts of  power, beauty, and truth by rushing to the end. We fail to see how nature imbues even the starkness of dead winter growth with beauty. We fail to notice the contrast and details offered in the black and white looking for the color. There is beauty in grief I told them quietly. I encouraged them to not be in such a rush to get through their grief that they miss the moments of beauty and grace.

Sometimes, we have to remove the saturation and stop rushing to get to the Amen or the end. And so on a day of emotional tsunami’s without a break, the whisper returned my message to the group. Just be present. Just be present. Dwell in the black and white of now. And so, with this little scrich, I bow my head and with hands to my heart, repeat Rilke’s words:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” 

Amen. Begin again…..