"How can I focus my flickering?"

Regent's Park, London

Sometimes, I lose my way. (I bet that sometimes you do too. But I'm not going to make assumptions. So I'll refrain from writing 'we' here.) Sometimes, I lose my way. Sometimes, it just seems easier to fall out of a prayer routine, to forget to live my faith. Sometimes, I let myself get swept up in my busy life and forget to make time for God.

But always, always, always, God is there, and He is good. And He always welcomes His lost sheep back with open arms, for which I am so grateful.

It has been a hectic month over here, as I've said in video after video. But I'm realizing that there is a danger in being so busy, even if it is busy with friends and family: it becomes far too easy, at least for me, to use that craziness as an excuse to hide behind when I'm feeling spiritually lazy. Yet God called me back, and how beautiful was His call.

Faith's a tide, it seems, ebbs and flows responsive

to action and inaction.

~ Denise Levertov: excerpt from 'The Tide'

Lord, not you,

it is I who am absent.

At first, belief was a joy I kept in secret,

stealing alone

into sacred places:

a quick glance, and away - and back,

circling.

I have long since uttered your name

but now

I elude your presence.

I stop

to think about you, and my mind

at once

like a minnow darts away,

darts

into the shadows, into gleams that fret

unceasing over

the river's purling and passing.

Not for one second

will my self hold still, but wanders 

anywhere,

everywhere it can turn. Not you,

it is I am absent.

You are the stream, the fish, the light,

the pulsing shadow,

you the unchanging presence, in whom all

moves and changes.

How can I focus my flickering, perceive 

at the fountain's heart

the sapphire I know is there?

~Denise Levertov: 'Flickering Mind'

Levertov, Denise. The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1975.