Music Mondays

There is something about a piano that stirs my soul.  I have been listening to this album by Philip Wesley over the last few days.  I am particularly taken by the piece I've embedded above entitled, "Light and Shadow."  So often our dualistic minds want to classify and categorize everything.  We have containers labeled, "Good" and "Bad" in our minds and we want to file every experience and encounter in one of those boxes.  But sometimes it isn't that easy.  Sometimes a moment might initially be bad, only with time reveal something good.  There is a messy mixture of both good and bad in our lives that play prayerfully off each other. 

Likewise we tend to think of light as good, shadow as bad.  Yet, the gospel of nature has been trying to teach and tell us that these two are in a divine dance with each other.  We need shadows, night, to see the stars.  We need night to slow down, after all when you cannot see well you don't want to bump into the dresser or stub your toe.  We need a time each day when our souls can catch up with us.  We need rest to be renewed.  And we need light streaming in with its generous offering of vitamin D for our bodies.  Just as a leaf soaks in the rays of sun to feed, fuel the growth, so as humans (made from the same soil in which a tree is nurtured and nourished) we need to feel the warmth of sun baptizing our faces.

Metaphorically, life is a divine dance between light and shadow.  And I want to be careful to suggest or say an experience is always one or the other.  For example, laughter can be a light to our lives or it can be at another's expense that hurts and harms and perpetuates prejudice.  Pain can initially feel like a shadow but as we process the difficult days might reveal a truth we never would have heard any other way.  Not that all pain does this, but sometimes it can.  Light and shadow moving mysteriously and marvelously together.

I often wonder if we say Jesus was born on a silent, holy night under a star-filled sky because during the daytime we are too busy, too wrapped up in our own agendas to really pay attention to God.  Even though God interrupted and entered our world at a night, most were still to preoccupied to pay attention.  Might that still be true?

There is a prayer practice known as the examine, where every night, before you go to bed, you review the day inviting God to sit alongside you. 
Where did the light stream in beautiful ways?
Where was the light too bright, even blinding?
Where did the shadow disguise or disrupt you?
Where did the shadow help slow you down?
How might tomorrow be a day saturated with the sacred?

I pray this week you might practice the examine, sit with these question each night, maybe as you reply the above melody of music above. 

May there be more than a trace of grace guiding each of us in these days of shadow and light.

Blessings ~~