My Portion (Ps 73)

If Raven has come visiting you it can mean any number of things. Most powerful of all is the synchronicity that Raven assures you is pending. He is a master of bending and folding time and space so that you are exactly in the right moment at the right time. As a messenger you are reminded that those around you are reflecting back at you the things you most have to learn about yourself.Know that when Raven appears that magic is imminent. Raven is about rebirth, recovery, renewal recycling and certainly reflection and healing. He signifies moving through transitions smoothly by casting light into the darkness.

1 Kings 17:1-16

 Elijah the Tishbite, the word of the Lord came unto him saying: Get thee hence, and turn eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith that is before Jordan. And it shall be that thou shall drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there. And he went and did according unto the word of the Lord; for he went and dwelt by the brook Cherith that is before Jordan.

And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening and he drank of the brook.   

And the rest of the story goes that the brook dried up, and the Lord directed Elijah to Zarephath, to a suicidal widow who was considering the dire state of her existence, but was moved to compassion to help Elijah She not only fed him but befriended him, and in effect nursed him back to health. There are two stories here; the first is the ravens bringing Elijah food and drink, which is totally out of character for that species. A raven is known for being a voracious scavenger, eater and selfish at that. A raven would not make a good “carrier pigeon, because it would not typically return to the one who sent it, case in point Noah.

Noah sent out a swallow, a dove and a raven. The first two came back, but the raven did not. So I imagine that the Lord had to “re-teach” the ravens, and change their hearts so that they would have compassion on Elijah, and they would share of their hard earned scavenge, maybe even giving him the choicest morsels. So the brook dried up; and notice that the definition of the name of the brook Cherith means “a cutting, a separation”. Sometimes the word “cutting” refers to “cutting a new covenant”.

After my husband died, I went around my house, looking through his things, to see if he may have left a note, or scribble or something that would lead me to him. But my husband was not a writer; he was though a prolific story teller, a BS spreader and the like. He was a Welshman, moody and sentimental, given to weepy expressions of love and caring. He would leave messages on my phone, by singing songs he made up. (I still have 2 on my office answering machine.) The only thing I found was a couple of dollars in two new wallets that I gave him. (Which he never used), I looked in his Scriptures, and where most people scribbled, he did not, so even though he read his scripture, most of the pages are pristine. No love letters, no messages on scraps of paper. But what he did do was to always make a point, when talking to our friends and neighbors, to tell these people how much he loved me, how much I meant to him, what a wonderful wife I was. (Unknown to me), so I have found that at my lowest points, that when I really need to hear someone “say something to me”, in kind words, a neighbor will come and tell me these things. We have a neighbor who is a “curmudgeon”. He is this weird, little old guy (lol) who was a gear head like my husband. And they would compete with each other to wee who had the most tools, special tools and tools hard to find. He didn’t talk much and to this day I don’t know his name, but on Christmas he knocked on my door, and gave me a beautiful flower arrangement. He told me how much he missed my husband. So a “raven” brought a crust of bread to my door.

Last year, I prayed to be able to “put things into perspective”, that my grief would not overwhelm me, that I could just not remember the hard parts. There are a lot of hard parts, and just like any “random request” like that, with no stipulations, everything is relative, and so the “the place of forgetting” is forged. My days go fast, like hours, my weeks run like days. I hold on tight to every moment that is important to me so that I can at least be “present”. I have misplaced a lot of stuff, and I have re-bought things at least twice.  The absence of love leaves a void; the absence of touch leaves a soul to become stunted in its growth.

In this story, I am “the widow” of Germantown. Not suicidal, but blessed with an abundant spirit of love and compassion. The one thing that really sustained me after the funeral was my friends and neighbors really looking out for me. People would bring me meals, groceries, money, etc. I would come home from work and find care packages, and luckily for me the squirrels did not run off with them. (There is a special kind of squirrel/rodent that lives in my “hood”. They are trained even to open packages from the mail man). People would come and take care of me and I have made some really loyal friends now. I suppose that any friend who can manage you when you are a blithering idiot (which I was at times) is a keeper. Let's give the Lord a praise.

The Lord is my portion: