Return

The weighted smell of wet, wind-blown golden leaves.

The musty, enclosed feeling as I climb the steep farmhouse stairs.

The quiet of a forest compared to the stillness of a desert.

The whispering of rustling leaves instead of the feathery humming of pine needles.

It’s funny the things you’ve forgotten which strike you when you return again.

We remember the heights and the lowest points, but we often forget the everyday ordinary that traces our former lives.

Happy Autumn. 😊 I always think of this season as the time of returns. And I often travel back East to visit my parents this month.

I often contemplate these returns as restful, peaceful, reckoning periods. Then I wonder why, as my trips usually involve monitoring running toddlers and yelling children, juggling luggage and little people across the airlines, and gingerly guarding my sore back as I try to keep up with work duties at night.

Yet, something even about that word – return – soothes my stressed being.

In my favorite of his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot writes, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (LG V).

Each time I return, I know this place and its people more deeply and I feel that I understand myself less.

Or I travel back home, relish the embrace of my familiar bed, but find myself lost here when there I was found.

But I must remember – neither home is a true refuge: it is a marker. A leading line that is itself a window.

“And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfilment.”

Do you feel as if your purpose is beyond the end you had thought? When you glance around, are your days built of husks with no fruit softening the ground beneath?

Often these last few years, I’ve been told of the fruitfulness of practicing a life examen; of the calm and discernment that can follow setting apart a time of quiet, to reflect on the meaning of the events surrounding us, the revelations from the ebb and flow of our virtues and vices, and see the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

But just as frequently, I find myself frustrated in this endeavor – because only sometimes are we given the grace of sight.

Sometimes, honestly, we walk in damp clouds, uncertain whether we’re climbing to a vista or approaching a dramatic drop-off. And peering intently at the fog does not make it disperse.

So I’ve altered my purpose of these prayerful times, searching out not resolution but reminders. What in my past weeks has made me remember joy? Or duty? Can I still recall the moments in my past when I did glimpse purpose or see mysteries revealed? Were there times when HIs presence did make sense of all this mess?

I try not to find God’s will but to remember it is. Not to look down the path, but to affirm that this is a path.

Faith is a gift. And sometimes we must wait for it. But the waiting itself is a recognition, and is its seed.

By traveling on, we circle back to the Love that bore us. By reaching the evening, we will find ourselves returning to morning.

Let us make today an act of knowing: knowing the holy messages we have heard in the past will return to us – more deeply – and that every movement which seems like a breaking of our hearts or our road is just another step returning to Love.

The traveler of Little Gidding repeats, “And all shall be well”.

 If we do not cease from our exploring. If we still wait to hear that Voice calling.

Until we are suddenly and perfectly found home.