It's OK to listen to the grey voice

There is a difference between change and transformation. Change happens when something old dies and something new begins. I am told that planned change is as troublesome to the psyche as unplanned change, often more so. But change might or might not be accompanied by transformation of soul. If change does not invite personal transformation, we lose our souls. At times of change, the agents of transformation must work overtime, even though few will hear them. The ego would sooner play victim or too-quick victor than take the ambiguous road of transformation. We change-agents need a simple virtue: faith. It still is the rarest of commodities because it feels like nothing, at least nothing that satisfies our need to know, to fix, to manage, to understand. Faith goes against the grain.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace, "A Transitional Generation"

That's somehow what Lent feels like this year, for me. Somehow I've become part of the season more clearly this year than I can remember, and it's had some unexpected effects. My relative silence of the last few days is not merely down to busy-ness, though it has been a busy week, but to a kind of silence, a nothing-to-declare, a kind of spiritual statelessness, almost. It doesn't feel bad. It doesn't feel particularly good, either. Largely, it doesn't feel like anything, and yet I know without a shadow of doubt that there is major stuff going on under the surface. Loch Ness on a grey November day would be the image to bring to mind...   Urquhart Castle ruins from Loch Ness - Wikimedia Commons Music reference: It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice by the Jan Garbarek Group.