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Madonna and Child, Filippo Lippi and Workshop, 1447-1448

Meditation for the Fourteenth Day of Lent

This day I will be smarter than I was the day before.
I will learn about Colombia or Filippo Lippi or
Frederick Douglass or the Great Barrier Reef, and I
will study how to open up my heart.

This day I will be kinder than I was the day before. I
will not say Perhaps I should…. No, I shall do.
Somebody needs what I can give: a smile, but not
just that; a call, but more than that; a mitzvah, and
another. I will go to see my sister and will wrap her
in my arms and say I love you fifty times.

This day I will be stronger than I was the day
before. I shall lunch on crisp romaine and grated
cheddar cheese and pomegranate juice, with
butterscotch pudding for dessert, and I will walk a
mile no matter if it snows.

This day I will listen to more music—Aaron
Copland’s Saturday Night Waltz plays on the radio
as I write—and I will contemplate chords and
arpeggios and the key of B flat major.

This day I will be prayerful, more than I was
yesterday, and meditate and drink in God’s own
gentleness, petitioning for naught but love and
peace, for what else does a person need once one
has been hauled out of the pit?

And I will be more grateful than I’ve ever been
before, because another vast and malleable day is
added to my years, a day of scattered sunlight and
of friendship and of spring’s slow, adamant
approach, a day in which I count breaths and say
Thank you for each one, a day in which I hear my
neighbor crooning to her baby girl and I recall with
transient glee and startling precision my half-
century-ago young motherhood.

This day I will be more astonished than I was the
day before, because how can I fail to be surprised
when, all my plans and projects notwithstanding, I
don’t have the ghost of an idea what the next hour
holds?

This day I will love my life more than I loved it the
day before, because there is no future in loving the
past—a beautiful garden, to be sure, but one that is
frozen in memory. Only this day do new grasses
emerge from moist earth. Only now do sweet,
warm winds lift dry leaves and ruffle my hair, stroke
my face, and tell me their secrets. Only this day
grows according to my purpose, and God’s grace.

 

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