on the way

I haven't written to you in a while, and I've missed you.

It's not that I've had nothing to say. I have so much to say--too much, perhaps--and I've lost my voice.

That's not true. I know exactly where my voice is. It's stopped up in a jam of ideas right behind my sternum, and sometimes it aches. Sometimes I open my mouth to sing and there is no air. I've held my fingers over the keyboard in front of this blank screen countless times.

That's also not true. More often, I think about writing, and the picture of the blank screen in my mind's eye is so daunting that I don't even open this program. My fingers don't even get the chance.

I have an article to finish and a sermon to write from scratch by the end of the month, though. Something has to move. Something has to ease past the aching jam of ideas.

So, let me tell you about my commute.

Twice a week, I sit down on a train for a short ride into the District. Always, there is something in my hands--usually knitting, occasionally prayer beads. The metro in this city is not beautiful, and I don't need to pay attention in order to get where I'm going.

But between my start and my stop, the yellow line briefly emerges from below to cross the Potomac. Even though I know it is coming, the burst of light always grabs my attention. My fingers stop moving. I look up: trees...fence...bridges...river...monuments:

If, as Steven Prothero writes in The American Bible, the Declaration and the Constitution are, among other documents, the scripture of our civic religion, these monuments are our temple. These places where we go to remember our collective greatness and mourn our collective flaws help to maintain American community. 

And I get to visit them as often as I want. In fact, twice a day, two days a week, I see them as a matter of course. 

The view is always brief. If the train is packed, I may see only river, or only the heads and shoulders of other commuters. Nonetheless, that brief moment before the yellow line descends is a moment of wonder, a brief stillness in the mind while the body is in motion. 

There's something else to say, something about the river, but that idea remains stuck.

Let's hope that this idea has eased the jam, and I will write to you further anon.