Sometimes I can feel it coming on and other times it just hits me like a freight train. The downward spiral into the bastard self. Sometimes it happens when I am overwhelmed - the defenses go up and the shut down process begins. Sometimes it happens when I am ashamed or embarrassed - like an armadillo I curl up into a ball, desperate to take cover. Other times I can't quite pin-point the reason or explain it fully. There are also the times when I don't realize it until the darkness has already caved-in and all I can see is me.

When I find myself stuck in this inward position I need something or someone to disrupt this posture. Sometimes it is only on behalf of another that I am able to move.

The thing that struck me about the bumper sticker that was so divinely placed on the car in front of me is that both kindness and beauty require engagement with something or someone outside the self. Kindness requires me to acknowledge the presence of another and to say, "I see you." It means putting myself aside or maybe even giving it away. I cannot be kind without offering something of myself to someone else. Beauty, too, requires me to take notice. And there's something mysterious about something or someone beautiful that invites my being to engage. Beauty and kindness open me to a world bigger than myself.

The poet John O'Donohue said that your world can be changed with an "open heart and a watchful reverence." That is the posture I truly desire. I want a heart that lives up and out. A posture that leans toward another, not just itself. This is what I believe Christ is inviting me to, especially this Lenten season. God is calling me forth with God's own beauty and kindness and inviting me to move up and out of darkness, to lean toward the light.


*the painting - Juli Kalbaugh, Toward the Sun, 2010