Thinking about the past year, with its tsunami, droughts, famines, floods, human conflicts and the innumerable atrocities that take place almost every moment of the day, one can’t help but wonder what’s going on. Pushed to extremes, one may have even questioned the presence of the Higher Power, the Supreme Authority whose world this is and whose children suffer so.
But if there was indeed no presence, if there really was no Beauty and Light and Love, then how would we have had the ability to look a new dawn in the face? How would we have understood the fortune that made us survivors? How would we have the composure to take the next step?
Impossible.
And thus, it is not only important to survive from suffocating under the blankets of dark that envelope our being, but more importantly, to be able to recognize hope and joy where there seemed none, to hear the angel’s harp in the midst of angry noise, to discover the warmth of Grace in a game of cold chance.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
From cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.
– Rumi
With such a beautiful thought, we take leave of a year that has dealt its cards for each of us in a different way, grateful for the lessons it had come to teach us.
