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SPACES BETWEEN
By Mary Ann Archer, Spiritual Director
Looking at clouds one
day while traveling by train, I saw a crocodile mouth turn into a leaping panther, turn
into a running razor-backed lizard – all within a space of a minute or so.
Having tired of reading the book I brought along on my trip, and fascinated by the swiftly
shifting clouds – fleecy white against azure blue – I decided to try to find
more imaginative cloud pictures. And I did find many for several more minutes.
But there came a time when some clouds did not immediately suggest a known form.
It was then that Spirit
seemed to whisper in my ear. “Look at the blue between the clouds for
shapes.” It seemed a radical idea, completely new to me, but it worked. I
“saw” an owl’s ears and head, the barbell shape of an old fashioned phone
receiver, a rabbit’s face, even a woman’s pendulous breasts resting on a white
cloudy pillow!
Spirit seemed to speak
again to me. “Life is like this way of seeing. It’s in the spaces
between objects where God moves and mends, brings change and growth.”
I thought of how we
humans spend so much of our time seeing separate, line-bounded objects. “I am
distinct from you; the leaf is distinct from the sky.” And yet science tells us
that from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the most immense galaxy there is more space
than matter.
And then I thought of
the friend I was traveling to see, the friend who had forgotten to tell me her retirement
party (the reason for my trip) had been postponed a day, the friend who said she was
‘too busy’ to pick me up when I arrived in the city now a day too early.
Could God work in the spaces (rapidly shrinking physical space, but widening emotional
void) between us?
Perhaps the only way
was for me to become more wispy-edged – like the clouds I was watching – and
look for God to move in the emptiness between us. Perhaps I could ‘draw’
my personal outline more with a feather than with a black marker. Perhaps I could
defend my hurt and anger less and simply wait and watch the spaces between me and my
friend for God to bring healing by subtle rearranging.
Perhaps all of creation
is not only composed of the ‘open space’ of Spirit, but curatively connected by
that same ‘windy’ openness. Now the poem I had read in my train-journey
book made more sense. The poet, Lisel Mueller, imagines the impressionist painter
Monet refusing an eye operation that would help him see things more distinctly,
saying, I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches…
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
Burn to mix with air
And change our bones, skin, clothes
To gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
I resolve to watch for the re-fashioning breath of God in the “blue vapor”
spaces between.
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