That word again...

Innocently sitting down to read The Waiting Heart by Sue Monk Kidd, through which this reader has been moving slowly, what word comes gently, if not too subtley, floating out into the realm of syncronicity?  HESYCHIA!  "For heaven's sake" I exclaim to the Infinite One who seemed to be giggling at me, or maybe, and this is more likely, She was weeping over my slow-to-grasp-the-important, brain.

The day yesterday was spent in some angst about a disagreement...really about not getting my way. Maybe God was saying "For heaven's sake!" if this slow witted servant had been listening, instead of rolling around in the muddy dregs of her own needs and wants and FEARS.  Temper tantrums are not especially pretty when 4 year olds engage in them, and they are far less pretty when almost 53 year olds engage. 

So the reader trudged upstairs and into her sacred space to "rest in God."  After fidgeting, aware of the pain in her back and hip and feet from a forced march up a very steep hill earlier that afternoon, Spirit whispered in her rebellious and tired ear:  "Go lie down and get comfortable.  It's okay.  Let me do the praying."

"You know, it really isn't helpful when people who are supposed to be my best friend tell me I'm broken"  She whines.

Spirit sighs.  "Oh my dear, aren't you the one who said you were broken?"

"Yes, but she sure didn't have to agree with me!"

"Shhhh....rest."

And the rebellious, out of sorts, whiney servant heard the words "In repentence and REST you shall be saved.  In quietness and trust is your strength." 

The servant has a hard time keeping her mouth closed, and is awfully fond of having the last word, as it were.  Quietness isn't always something she willingly chooses.

But slowly, the arguments fade away, the outrageous pain in her heart begins to throb a little less indignantly.  Slowly love comes into the room and sooths the soul, the heart and yes, even the body.

In the end "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." 

And as the hero in a fairly popular and recent movie might add to Julian of Norwich's words:  "And if all is not well, it's not the end yet."  Well, perhaps that doesn't quite fit when speaking of the Eternal.  "All shall be well" is already and not yet.  Sigh.

But there's something to this Hesychia thing.  One's soul and perhaps even one's mind and body enters the realm of the already, while the "not yet" is left outside for a while.