completeness

Date: 25 March 2007 16:24:00

This afternoon I attended a new Taize meeting. It has been started in one of the upstairs rooms at Wellington by a group of PhD theology students who can't make the Monday meeting at Strathclyde, and it's only the second Taize group I've attended (excepting the small matter of a 2000-strong congregation in Taize itself last summer).

Today has a sort of wisftulness to it, after that meeting. One of the prayers contained a truth I've often found inexpressible:

Things do not have to be complete to be beautiful and right.

I sat with that for a while after it had been said, in the quiet between individual prayers. And I sit with it now. There are many places, many areas in my life where I don't have closure. Where I've been unable to finish things, or (less often) unwilling to let go.
Where am I going? What am I doing? I don't know. I don't know what all this is for, any of it. With very small children on my hands, life is never about the ultimate end of anything, it's always about the immediate, the now, the hunger, the constant need of a child this age is overwhelming. My time as Charlie's father, and as Rosie's, won't be complete for a long time. But even so, he will never be THIS incomplete again.
I think that feeling has extended to other parts of me. I just feel I'll never be finished, I'll never not be tired. I mean, it really does apply to EVERYthing right now, and not just my uni work, either. All my relationships feel like they're fractured, rushed and failing. Every job I do in the new flat feels makeshift, and every time I hire someone to do a job, I feel a chasm of debt open up beneath me. I feel unready, unwashed, unclean. It's like nothing will ever feel complete again, and then

suddenly and only for a moment

there comes something like today's prayer meeting. I floundered and wallowed among the humanness of it all but there in the middle for just long enough was a silent crystal moment. Where things felt right.

It felt right. That's all I'm trying to tell you. For long enough to count. It felt right.