Nail Polish and Icons
Nope! I am not going to suggest creating icons or touching up icons with nail polish. It’s the juxtaposition of purple and blue nail polish by the pantokrator icon on the coffee table where we pray morning prayer that makes me smile. Sr. MO bought the nail polish as a gift for our four year old granddaughter, since she is into such things. Distracted by other things she forgot to take them home. So there they were this morning --those two little bottles of garish color inhabiting the same space--beside the “all powerful” One. They were for me symbols of the hopes. desires and interplay of the world. Such is the profane and sacred tumble and mix of this worldly life.
Living the Rule of Life and Service for us Lukans is just this worldly. We are a religious community in dispersion in over eight hundred peculiar and particular places. We pray and work is settings that mean each of us has to discern and determine the particular and peculiar ways we will embody and enact Christ’s call to live the baptismal covenant and the “Rule” amid nail polish and children, spouses and dependent parents, oil soaked beaches and pristine forests, college campuses and pre-schoolers, less than ideal/real churches, with specific health and age issues, and unique economic stressors. We inhabit the same space with all these in apostolic hope, seeking to carry on the practices of lived faith. We are the bottles of nail polish juxtaposed with the Word made flesh and present by the Spirit. When I think of that I smile. I hope you do too, and that you think of specific sisters and brothers, see their faces, imagine their lives, and realize anew that by grace all of life tends toward holy gratitude .