Reading The Weeks, February Through May
In the red light of an early sunset on brick buildings and red-brown hills, I walk down westward, thinking of the questions I’ve been asked about my perspective on spirituality. It’s hard to talk about those things. There seems to be no language for it these days—how to find one? Make one? ‘Be bold, be bold, be not too bold’–that’s the magic motto of the lady knight Britomart in a story. I take from the red light a sense of a future. Out of what need or hope do people raise these questions?
In some moments we cope with the need for a spiritual grounding—or some kind of grounding in values—we cope by creating time. It’s time as a day to be seized, a window of a moment to look through, not to lose–hope making its own time, valued time in the midst of extreme stress of busyness, a place for presence made by risk. And the risk is also a reaching back of something from a future into this present, something hoped for, not necessary. It’s “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” as the writer of Hebrews says –not seen yet, not except in the redness of the light, which will touch on the violet of dusk, in turn on the green-black of night, then the gray of another day.