Lift the Fog

Art by Alison Scott

Fog obscures the mountains this morning. Mo, the hermitage dog, called John and me to prayer. I lit the candles and stood for a moment, still thinking about the children and their teachers who were victims of such violence as has been repeated in various places and times even during my own short span of life. We began singing our plainchant prayer. Ave Maria...Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. "Hail Mary...Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen."

Powerfully, then, a sense of Holy Motherhood flooded me, along with a realization that this is what we desperately need in our culture and around the world. A mothering of God within our souls and towards the Divine Child that resides in everyone and everything.

We are limited creatures, and most often it takes a lifetime (and possibly more than one) to comprehend the eternal value of what our existence means and how we are to live. The Sandy Hook massacre brings me to my knees...that human beings are capable of this. We are capable. There is a frightened, often angry child in the depth of the human soul that needs the embrace of love, the compassion that accepts, the mother in all of us: woman, man and child. (I wrote first about this yesterday at Sunshine Hill)

After chanting the psalms, after a deep contemplation of the presence of the Holy One among us, we prayed for those who have died as victims of violence. May violence be rooted from our hearts. May the fog of our blindness lift. May the Mother of our souls comfort us. May the Holy Spirit of Life transform our fear and anger and bring us to an experience of our oneness.