Recently I’ve been going through a rough time, juggling back-to-back losses of family members, recovering from seasonal affective disorder, and trying to reinforce positive self-talk after a recent batch of gender dysphoria. In addition to the everyday stress of teaching and dissertation prospectus writing, this has made for a tempestuous start to the spring and an inability to access prayer or movement in the ways that usually sustain me. This Lent, I’ve been focusing on return by trying to correct behaviors and actions that make me feel less like myself/hamper my spiritual practice. Generally this has looked like mindful eating/meal-planning and exercise, making a greater effort to say the Daily Office everyday, and watchful care over my energy. A while back, Twitter brought a Robert Hayden poem my way that I’d forgotten about entirely. Here is the text of “Ice Storm”:
Unable to sleep or pray, I stand
by the window looking out
at moonstruck trees a December storm
has bowed with ice.
Maple and mountain ash bend
under its glassy weight,
their cracked branches falling upon
the frozen snow.
The trees themselves, as in winters past,
will survive their burdening,
broken thrive. And am I less to You,
my God, than they?
I read both a quiet frustration and a deep hope into the last two lines; the poem’s final question holds some degree of bitterness/dissatisfaction with the speaker’s current circumstances, but also a reminder that Divine love transcends our struggles with earthly burdens. Undoubtedly Hayden was thinking here of Matthew 6:26, 28-30:
“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all of his glory was arrayed like one of these”. – NRSV
“Ice Storm” offers a subtle reminder that it is possible for us to carry great weight and still live, that brokenness and death are not synonymous, and that change (even when it seems like we are frozen forever) will eventually come. Indeed, we are more to God and to ourselves than our broken branches, and there is life after the frost. May we continually ask for the strength, patience, and support we need to make it to the thaw, and may Lent’s focus on Jesus’s and our own journeys through death into life enable us to be tender with ourselves, to honor our brokenness, and to be patient with ongoing processes of healing.
JKR+
Africana Anglo-Catholic 