Visitation

Standing before this painting, I remember confusion.

Pure emotion of entry... visitation... energy... blood, like Leda under the feathers of the swan, though less violated and more intrigued, comforted... perhaps.

Perhaps... the way I felt this morning, rocking in the white wooden rocker, beneath the warmth of morning light. Watching wasps play at the tips of the hemlocks, their wings made amber-gold by the sun's entry, visitation. And the hemlocks too, visited, energized by light that seemed to glow from the inside out of their myriad needles, transforming them into something like green wands in the hands of a woodland fairy.

Myriad... thoughts played in my mind... of Clairvaux, who, it has been said "absorbed the Bible so completely that his writing breathes with it." Thoughts, too of L'Engle's tribute, written by Luci Shaw... her longtime friend, who observed that L'Engle loved scripture and read it every day and that it inhabited her writing, as if from the inside out.

Out... over the waters of Genesis, the Spirit too, ruah*, breathed first words of light, life, entry, visitation, energy.

Holy Spirit, come afresh and visit Your Words in me, that my own words might golden-amber, life, light be.


Clairvaux quote from Water From a Deep Well, p.178. *Ruah means spirit or breath in Hebrew. Stations of the Cross painting photo by L.L. Barkat.