On Saturday our Jack Russell, Leia, broke her leg. This new little development in our family is going to complicate my life a bit, I think. Those who know Leia know that she is a little white and brown bundle of endless energy. She wants to play. All the time. She is now forbidden from playing. For six weeks. Would you like to know how I am spelling torture these days? s.i.x.w.e.e.k.s. I seriously don't know how we are all going to survive it. Leia has a prescription for sedatives. I do believe I am going to need one as well. We will survive it, though. Her leg is broken. Her eyes are kind of sad and confused (except when she forgets she has a broken leg and brings me her rope or ball and looks up at me with those limpid brown eyes and begs, begs, begs me to throw her toy). But her leg is all wrapped up, and she will heal, and the day will come when I will wish I could refill her sedative prescription just so I don't have to throw that ball one.more.time.
I wish I could get an x-ray of my soul, because if I had one, I think a doctor might tell me that my soul is a little broken right now, and that I need to wrap it up and nurture it and be nice to myself for six weeks or so until it heals again. Soul x-rays just don't exist, however, and besides, I can't point to a specific event that fractured my soul, like we can with Leia. Maybe I have a stress fracture of the soul? That is more like it, I think.
This past week the image that has kept flashing into my mind is of me in some sort of freefall. For some strange reason I have been fighting against despair, and I don't really know why. I have no real reason, which is frustrating to me. (Not that I am wanting a legitimate reason to despair, of course, but if I don't know what is causing it, how can I fix it?) It's interesting, because while I don't think that doing the Liturgy of the Hours seems to be making a significant difference in how I am feeling emotionally, I do think that each time I stop to do the morning office or midday office or vespers or compline, it feels like a rope is lowered down to me that I can grasp hold of and hang on to for a bit before starting to fall again.
Yesterday morning I had a very unexpected rope handed to me. Matt was supposed to be the liturgist yesterday and read the Call to Worship and the morning's Scripture reading. I must say I am a bit jealous of this role. For some reason reading aloud the Call to Worship or the scripture for the day at church always tugs at something inside me way down deep, and I find it incredibly meaningful. Yesterday Matt needed to take Leia to the vet, so I volunteered to do his reading for him.
And then I looked over Matt's shoulder at his computer to see what the Call to Worship would be. And this is what it was:
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
Those lines by Leonard Cohen are so often my mantra when I tend to lurk in the shadows of chiaroscuro and shy away from the light that those shadows are making. And yesterday, I got to stand in front of the church that I love and speak those words of truth to others who were lurking in the shadows, and to myself.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in. Amen.
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