Door to Summer

Amidst great beauty, found in poetry

tea cups, the surprise burst of a perfect orange

the anticipation of a summer strawberry

I have been thinking.

We are given every day by God the option to say

YES or NO.

I have seen more that to say YES is to say

NO to despair, to destruction,

to a belief in the world as hopeless

or that we are a hopeless case

unable to be saved by God's

love

or His Son's redemption.

The book, I have not yet read, speaks of a cat looking for

the door into summer;

Cleo loves summer. Loves being all day by my sliding door

listening to the birds, people, cars going by.

Our door into summer must come

by repentance.

We must ask for this door to be opened; and we must walk through.

It seems that our winters often create the path towards this door;

the door's key is humility;

to know we are made of dust.

To see the door somehow we must fight despair.

My study of despair in Paradise Lost

and through reading Kathleen Norris' book on Acedia

taught me that to be in despair

is fundamentally to have a wrong understanding about reality.

It is even to deny what is true reality.

God is the Creator of the World. God's Christ is the redemption of

the world, of us. The Holy Spirit comes to infuse

to fill us

with the love and knowledge of Christ

within us, deep, opening our inner heart to Christ's light.

God is the source of all that is good. God created the world.

God is the definition of what is most real;

we live upside down

most of the time

not living in the reality of God's hope underlying the world.

To be in despair, in acedia, is to deny God; to deny God's love.

To deny the God of hope

is to deny God's redemption as the hope

that underies all beauty

all good,

all love.

And it is in our nights

in the daily work of living

that we must seek this understanding.

We must learn to say YES to God

to whatever this means

and seek

with repentance

to step out of our despair.