Lightning and Miracles and Lightning

Ah, the whimsy of Spring. A bit like adolescent hormones isn't it? One day the air is warm and promising, the next cold and dark. It seems as if there is a struggle between the deathlike grip of winter who does not want to retreat and springs potential for new life.  Back and forth they go through the months of March and April, taking us with them as our own spirits lift and fall.  This week a fierce wave of weather moved through the south. Late in the night high winds toppled sleeping trees as the sky above the lake was illuminated with flash after flash of lightning.  It felt like winter's last stand.

In the long tradition of the hero's journey, there inevitably appears some last encounter to be endured before he can make his way through the lightning and thunder of the underworld and back up into the light of the world.  It arrives when the hero who has already endured and prevailed many trials, is the most vulnerable.  The famous 'dark night of the soul'. These are the hours when regret and loss of faith swirl and try to suffocate. This is when sorrow seems the most overwhelming, suffering meaningless, all choices untenable, and all efforts wielded in vain.  There is only awareness that despite every thing achieved so far, nothing is decided. In those moments if he is to truly be a hero, he comes to the  understanding that whatever happens next is no longer in his power to control.  This of course, as the stories affirm to us, is when the magic sword is discovered, the angel appears, or the lost key is found.  Only then, does the miracle happen.

There is a great cry in our world for miracles right now. Change, much of it frightening in its intensity and outcome, is everywhere. Nothing seems sure. Everyone believes their way is the right way. We are all watching deep in the night, the lightning flashing, as the thunder rolls and trees fall. And, fear? Fear is everywhere: for personal safety, for a future, in many places in our world, for tomorrow. We are realizing on many levels, the limits of our power and it is I believe, a very good thing.  We are learning to see things as they are-- not as we think they should be.  We are learning to accept lasting change is the child of suffering and hardship; that solutions arise not from force of will, but from being courageous enough to sit with the untenable; acknowledging the reasons for the existence of all involved, until the tension between the two creates the moment for the miracle.  We are living in a powerful, momentous time in history, but we have always been moving toward it. This is the way of the world. Change sweeps up all the parts of life we don't want to think about much less deal with and asks us to take a good look. If we don't, then it rubs our faces in it. We have come once again, to that place in our journey where it is time to surrender our singular solutions and devote ourselves to accepting we may not know what the solutions are.  It happens in each of our lives, in our families and neighborhoods; in our governments and across our imprint on the natural world. Over and over we are being invited to surrender our preconceived way things should be and admit that while we do not know the shape of what is to come, we are willing to stand and endure the agony of waiting, until the miracle is made manifest.