Let go and trust

The icon you see here is by Suzanne Schleck who will be the instructor of the workshop I am off to attend this week at Kanuga.

I am heading into this week overwhelmed by gratitude. I am so grateful for my friend and colleague Jane Smith who will take care of priestly and pastoral responsibilities while I am away. I am grateful to a congregation that shares my joy in being able to have a week away to pursue an activity to feed my mind and my soul--especially wonderful and needed as Lent is fast approaching--and people who so capably handles all the parish details (they do this all the time--I just don't always say thank you). Everything--attending to office activities, prayer groups, worship services--will go on without me. This is good and joyful. I am grateful to friends who gave me a "scholarship" so that I could attend this workshop. I am grateful to Kanuga for attending to my food allergy. I am grateful to my friend and artist Verle Lynn Cox who showed up this week with a beautiful cloth she made for me to cover my icon and to Lynn McLure who showed up to share an exquisite iconography calendar she got while in Amsterdam. I am so grateful to my friend Margaret Joffrion who has been the bright star leading me to this workshop. I am grateful to all the icon writers who have gone before me throughout the centuries. (Now is this point where I thank my parents, my sweet husband and children and the Academy?)

So yes! I am grateful. Can you also tell I am seriously excited about the week ahead? I go as a complete and total novice. I think it is essential that we all pursue things, at least occasionally, where we are beginners. It always opens my mind and my heart to lose myself in something where I have no expertise at all. This will be such a week.

We'll be using traditional materials of egg tempera and gold leaf and have been told that the process has less to do with one's ability to paint than with "a willingness to let go and trust".

Let go and trust. So simple to say, to write and so difficult to really do. That's why I need practice in doing just this--which is one reason I am heading to Kanuga for this workshop this week.

Let go and trust. My mantra for the week.

Lent is just around the corner. How will you practice letting go and trusting?