Rediscovering Wonder

When I was a little girl growing up in the country, wonder was an everyday experience. The caterpillars we watched morph into butterflies, the birds we spent days trying to catch, the creek we wandered for hours, the snakes we actually did catch and keep in jars on the stone wall out back until we tired of them and let them go.

Today they say that children experience grief in spurts, moving quickly back and forth between moments of intense sadness and periods of play and humor.  That rings true to me, and it also explains why otherwise intelligent and perceptive adults fifty years ago believed the professionals who told them that children do not grieve.  Those moments of intensity come on quickly for children, and disappear almost as fast, rendering them invisible to people who don't want to see them anyway.  And children are quick to sense the latter, and learn to keep their sorrows to themselves.

Thus I could roam the countryside, play sixteen-inning games of softball, and splash in summer camp brooks and waterfalls, finding wonder easily despite the airless density of childhood loss.

For adults, it's somewhat different.

A couple of summers ago, I heard myself saying to a spiritual director, "I was, quite simply . . . completely enchanted by my children.  And then . . . one of them was gone.  And thus enchantment evaporated from my life."

I've been reflecting on that statement this summer.  Perhaps my capacity for wonder, if not actual enchantment, is making a comeback.  Or, at least, tapping on the door.  This summer has already ushered in its grueling moments, with more predicted ~ most of them having to do with pretending to enjoy myself so that others are not burdened.  But I find that I am longing for some genuine joy.

Interesting, isn't it, that this surge of hopeful anticipation should accompany my renewed ability to walk short distances?  Yesterday I walked a mile around my immediate neighborhood early in the morning, and another mile in the opposite direction in the evening.  It's such a pleasure to see the world on foot again, to notice faces and dogs and gardens in ways that one can't from a car.

 

In her poem When Death Comes, Mary Oliver, who has certainly experienced her own deep loss, says:

 

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

Regretfully, I will not be able to say that of all my life.   Or, perhaps, I will.  Perhaps the black hole of the last six years, sucking all the gravity into a huge and heavy space of darkness, will someday reveal itself as its own venue of wonder.

 

But for now, I think I would like to return to the more conventional forms.

 

"And after this our exile . . " (Ash Wednesday)

My official Ash Wednesday sermon is here.   I'm preaching it again, partly because the crush of events the past few weeks have squeezed time until there is none, partly because I'm in a new place with new people who've not heard it, and partly because I like it.

 

My real Ash Wednesday sermon is more like this: I have become numb to this liturgical day.  We have had countless discussions, my friends and family and I, about human remains.  Ashes from last year's palms look nothing at all like human ashes. The former have become merely a ritualistic accoutrement for me and I am finding, to my astonishment, that ritual is losing its significance for me.  Human ashes seem utterly sacred to me, and I cannot conceive of a ritual that might encompass the vastness of the universe of love that they represent.  Nothing is ever enough.   

 

Every year I read T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday.  I suppose that I first read it under the tutelage of Miss P. in high school; she would have pointed out source after source for the imagery to her reluctant girls, we who were focused more on springtime than on Eliot's conversion.  Then again under Mr. M. in college who, because we were students in an honors seminar, left us mostly to our own outside reading for interpretive questions.  And then, year after year for myself, because, whether or not one imagines God, it would not be Lent if one did not ponder whether one hopes to turn again.

 

Different years, different lines.  This year, "after this our exile."  Exile is a good word.

 

 

 

Image: Haystack Rock, Oregon Coast, ashes to the right.

Reverence: Healing

The cat squirms in my lap for a few moments and then leaps, an elegant arc of orange and white fluff, four feet into the air and through the doorway into the next room.

 

The vet had told us that she would lie quietly, recovering for a couple of days, and not to permit her to run around.  Ah, but the cat is six months old, and I am sixty years.  There are some differences.

 

Yesterday, utterly discouraged, I huddled under my blanket in my space, the corner of our living room where my recliner and table scattered with meds and electronics are located.  I laughed briefly when I read another woman's account of her recovery from ankle surgery; she describes an identical geography.  But I wanted  to cry when I looked at the dates on her descriptions and realize how long a recovery this will be. 

 

Each trip to the bathroom, eighteen steps  through the same sunroom into which the cat flew with such ease, and eighteen steps back, hopping with my entire weight borne by my walker, hands aching, is an undertaking akin to hiking the Great Wall.   I have had to relinquish my teaching job, and to give up my long-anticipated retreat time.  Will my pastorate go as well?    There's so much to worry about, work-wise and money-wise.   

 

And yet, healing is taking place.  In some mysterious and miraculous way, the severed edges of bone are binding themselves back together, recreating blood flow and rebuilding marrow and spongy and hard bone.  Just as astonishingly, my body is accepting the presence of metal parts as the new normal. 

If all goes well, the result will be an ankle that will support walks on the beach some months from now.

 

Miscellaneous movements ripple through even this disrupted and limited life.  I hear from a lady twenty years my senior, a new widow, and I am able to write to her with the authority of experience about her days of freshly felt grief, the exhaustion and the disorientation.  I don't mention that the spirit often takes considerably longer to heal than the body. 

 

I ponder Ignatius, he of the 1521 cannonball injury, which resulted in months of bed-ridden recovery and the understanding of religious psychology that led to the Spiritual Exercises.   What would he think, I wonder, of my binge-watching of The Sopranos, which I have not seen before?  An extended meditation on spiritual desolation if ever there were one. 

 

And last night, or this morning, around 3:00 a.m., I turned to read a piece written by the Australian Jesuit poet Peter Steele S.J, to which my friend Michelle has linked.  When I first saw her post, I had saved it for later, thinking to pray with the poem as a form of lectio divina, but when I went to the link at 3:00 a.m.,  I discovered that, unbeknownst to me, Peter Steele died of cancer in the summer of 2012.

 

I am devastated. It was a stack of Peter Steele's poems that spiritual director emeritus had emailed to me in the first months after Josh died; the two men had developed a friendship while both were at Georgetown that year.  It was Peter Steele's poems that I sat reading, tears in my eyes, late one night in the computer lab at seminary, surrounded by other students pursuing their Greek or Hebrew, oblivious to anything beyond the linguistic challenges staring back at them from their screens. 

 

I never even met the man, and I'm sure he never knew of my existence, but I sat here, and sit here still, grieving the loss of someone who gave life to words in a way that touched me when it seemed that nothing could.

 

This poem to which Michelle linked, is an elegy of sorts, a litany of good-byes to places and sights the dying poet knows will not be his again.  And yet it is also a celebration, of the beauty of this life as recorded in one man's recollections.

 

It would seem that in his case, as in that of Ignatius, the body finally gave out, but the healed spirit continues to soar, with the lithe elegance of a small cat.

 

Lifetime Books

There's been a question making the FB rounds ~ something about books that have had an impact in your life, books you can't forget.  Here's my list, with a few annotations

 

1. To Kill a Mockingbird: My first adult book, in fifth grade.  I'm sure I've read it at least 50 times. 

2. Night: I don't know when I first read this, but I've taught it a few times.

 
3. Hamlet: I think I saw my first Hamlet production, believe it or not, in a Royal Shakespeare Company performance at Stratford-upon-Avon when I was in junior high. 

 4. Macbeth: Junior year high school English ~ big paper on Lady M.

 5. Poems of Emily Dickinson:  When I was a senior in high school, I did an independent study one quarter on mysticism in the poetry of ED.  I didn't think there was much chance of there being a God, but I guess that's never stopped me from pursuing the possibility. 

 6. Poems of T.S. Eliot: Another major feature of my junior year of high school.

 7. Dante's Inferno: I took a college course on Dante, in English in the Italian Department.  I don't think we ever got out of the Inferno.  I'd been waiting for that one since being introduced to it via Eliot (see above).

 8. By the Shores of Silver Lake: I inhaled the Little House books as a child.  I think the later ones made the biggest impression on me.  When we were high school seniors, a friend and I re-read them all, and we would pretend to be  Laura and Mary out there on the Dakota prairie during our nighttime winter walks between our dorm and the library, when the air was frigid and the snow high in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts.

 9. The Secret Garden: I've written about this one before, along with Heidi: Those wonderful childhood books in which motherless heroines prevail and, in the case of Mary Lennox, create something beautiful.  My kind of girls.

 10. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius:  Ten years since I first caught a whiff of these.  How I learned to pray.

 11. The Little Prince:   A children's book for adult readers.  The fox and the sunsets. 

 

Now that I think of it, I believe that all of this writing is connected. 

 

Despite my best efforts to the contrary, there are hundreds and hundreds of books in this house, and Kindle is not helping.  But I suppose that I could make do with the above plus a Bible on my proverbial desert island.

 

 

 

6-12/60

Horses in the pasture at camp ~ looks the same 50 years later.

Nine days till 60!  Looking back at ages 6-12:

The basics:  Stark realities:  My mother and baby brother were killed in a car accident when I was seven and my surviving brother was four; the two of us were badly injured.   Two and one-half years later we acquired our first step-mother, who brought two of her children from Florida and left two there with their father. (When I speak of my brothers, I mean the stepbrother who was my age, my biological brother 2.5 years younger, and the stepbrother 2.5 years younger than my own brother.) 

One word:  Bewildered.

 

Best memories:  Gwynn Valley Camp in NC, where I spent the summers I turned ten and eleven.  (All of my children would eventually become campers there, and two of them staffers.)  It was a long 500 miles from home and in those days, camp sessions were four and eight weeks long.  It separated me from my stepmother, gave me back some childhood and some sense of accomplishment, and saved my life in many ways.  Other best memories:  The trips my grandmother and I made to Williamsburg and out west: Salt Lake, Yellowstone, the Tetons.  The beginnings of my passion for travel.  And the monarch butterflies my grandmother "raised" on her back porch.

 

Biggest fears:  Other than the deep end of the pool, a fear which I conquered when I finally learned to swim at camp, I don't recall being afraid of much.  (My brothers and I really did spend long hours in fields and creeks hunting down innocent snakes, some of which we killed and some of which we saved for awhile in jars before letting them go.  And we spent a lot of time high in trees and riding our bikes a considerable distance from home.)  As I look back on those years, I realize that I was a little survivor.  It's a trait that would serve me well fifty years later.  I've never lost the sense that the universe is as treacherous and chaotic a place as it is mystifyingly lovely,  and that survival skills are good ones to keep handy.  I learned most of mine when I was seven and eight and nine.

 

Best book:  TKM, which I read for the first time under the covers with a flashlight in fifth grade.  Although our ages differed, the three of us older kids were remarkably like Scout, Jem, and Dill, and my father remarkably like Atticus.  

 

Music:  The Beatles, the beginning of the major soundtrack of  my life.

 

Quote:  Mary Oliver's entire "Love Sorrow" poem from her book Red Bird. This has become one of my favorites in the past few years, but I see now that it serves as a narrative for my childhood.

 

 

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.


 

Noticing

Nearly everything I've read so far this morning has been about Noticing.  I'm going to take that as a hint.

 

From 31 Days of St. Ignatius

 

From A Church for Starving Artists

 

From the Pope

 

From Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge (NM)

 

All of which reminded me of Mary Oliver's poem, "I happened to be standing."

Newbies

The ostensible subject matter of this particular Mary Oliver poem is crickets, but I think it applies to my house finches as well:

 

 

Let us hope

 

 

It will always be like this,

each of us going on

in our inexplicable ways

building the universe.

 

from

 

Why I Wake Early (2004)

Retreat Pondering

While I was on retreat, the following poem by Veronica A. Shoffstall popped up on People for Others.  I commented that it might well be re-titled "Retreat at Wernersville.

 

 

 

After a while you learn the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn't mean learning and
company doesn't mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises,
And you begin to accept your  defeat with your head
up and your eyes open, with the grace of an adult,
not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for
plans.
After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if
you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own
soul, instead of waiting for someone else to bring you
flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure...
That you really are strong,
And you really do have worth.

 

 

 

I would say that there's a Part II in this for me, which I'll post in a couple of days.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all

It was as His body;

If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,

 The amino acids rekindle,

 The Church will fall.

 It was not as the flowers,

Each soft spring recurrent;

It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

 Eleven apostles;

It was as His flesh; ours.

 The same hinged thumbs and toes

 The same valved heart

That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered

 Out of enduring Might

 New strength to enclose.

 Let us not mock God with metaphor,

Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,

Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded

Credulity of earlier ages:

Let us walk through the door.

 The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

 Not a stone in a story,

 But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of

Time will eclipse for each of us

 The wide light of day.

 And if we have an angel at the tomb,

Make it a real angel,

Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in

 The dawn light, robed in real linen

 Spun on a definite loom.

 Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed

 By the miracle,

And crushed by remonstrance.

 

 

~ John Updike

 

Both And Holy Week

"Whan that aprill with his shoures soote . . . ".*

 

"April is the cruellest month . . .".**

 

Which is it?

 

Holy Week precedes April this year (as Michelle also points out in referencing Chaucer as well), but the chronological calendar is not as important as the sacred one.

 

This is the fifth one without Josh.  It's a hard week. 

 

I spent a week on retreat a few autumns back, an entire week, contemplating the Stations of the Cross in the Wernersville Chapel.  Day after day I stood before those carvings, contemplating the depth of suffering of mother and son, friend and friend, disciple and Lord.  Sometimes the intricacies of the dark woodwork reflected Jerusalem in about the year 30.  Sometimes, Chicago 2008. 

 

On Sunday I will proclaim the hope of resurrection.  I have no idea what I am going to say.  Something from the Isaiah passage about new heavens and a new earth.  Something about how the resurrection narrative in Luke leaves us hanging ~ people who have run to tell others about an empty tomb but don't yet know what that means.  Something. 

 

We started, all those weeks ago, with ashes.  I still have an urn about half-filled with ashes, and I have those ashes I've stored in waters and mountains from west coast to east.  The tombs in the cemetery down the block are still slammed shut.  My friend likes to visit her husband's, but I don't know how she finds comfort in that concrete mausoleum door, sealed tight until her own demise. 

 

Which is it?  Shoures soote or cruelest month?  Both-And.  We don't know. 

 

Maybe it does look like this:

 

Week Four (Resurrection) of the Spiritual Exercises Windows, Seattle University Chapel

 

 

*The first line of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (14th century): "When April with its sweet showers . . .".

**The first line of T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922).

In the Bleak Midwinter

The young people seeking a pastoral presence and some structure for their candle-light service were adamant: Their friend, who had grown up in a Presbyterian Church down the road from mine of many years and died far away last week-end, did not believe in God, and they did not want to dishonor her memory with a gathering framed in religious terms. One of the dads ~ a neighbor and my daughter's grad school advisor, in fact ~ a Mennonite member of my home Presbyterian church, asked me as he arrived whether that particular message had been relayed to me.

"Yes, yes," I said.

And so here's what we did:

I offered some opening remarks.  I started with Emily Dickinson ~ "After great pain a formal feeling comes" ~ and reminded them that we were in that time frame, and of the essential demands that grief makes before celebration can ensue.

I shared a bit of information about suicide:

That it's a consequence of an illness, depression, which is every bit as insidious and devastating as cancer or heart disease.

That they might find it helpful to dispense with the phrase "She committed suicide'" and to replace it with "She died of suicide."  We would never say that someone committed cancer and, while suicide can appear to be an intentional, thoughtful act of a rational mind, things are not always as they seem.

That they are not to blame.  That, as the literature tells us, "If you had been responsible for this death, it would not have occurred."

They shared stories and memories.

Outside the small and dark picnic shelter, sheets of rain poured down, and the wind whipped across the lake.  The candles they lit as they played recordings of "For Good" and "Hallelujah" repeatedly sputtered and blew out.  Finally someone had an idea: Huddle closely together and hold a bundle of candles as one.  They were able to watch the light flame up in silence as they listened to their last piece of music (one they had assured me, correctly,  that I would not know).

 

Perhaps the most moving statement of the night came from the aforementioned dad, who noted that "The candles tell you: You shine when you come together."

 

As they dimmed their candles, I told them what I always tell people: Choose a date on next year's calendar, circle it, and fill the circle with the name of your friend.  When that day rolls around, sit down and write a letter filled with your memories ~ a letter to her parents, to her brother or sister, to each other.  It will be the most important thing you do that day.

 

And then I ended with another poem of Emily's, "Hope is the thing with feathers."

 

I don't know whether I was of any help.  I think that mostly they helped one another, with their memories and their music and their candles.

 

It felt odd to me, leading what was essentially a memorial service, without any mention of the God who watches over them and has welcomed their friend into wherever it is that we go and whoever it is that we become.  But it felt honest, as well, to try to offer them a sense of peace and hope in the context of a friendship that meant so much to them.

 

In Florida, there are two parents and a brother and a sister whose torment has only just begun. 

 

Lord, have mercy.

 

 

**********

 

 

I posted only yesterday's photo of the light on Facebook, as I felt that it would intrude on the young people's privacy to publish an image of their faces.  But here, where the readership is a small and fairly private group, I want to give a sense of these beautiful young people and the generous and giving spirit which they share.

Annunciation, Courage, A Little Commentary

My favorite Advent poem is Denise Levertov's. I wrote a bit of commentary at the bottom.

Annunciation

‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’
From the Agathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.

She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?

Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.

God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child – but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite
weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –

but who was God.

A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.

She did not cry, "I cannot, I am not worthy,"
nor "I have not the strength."
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

We Protestants, most of us, do not spend a lot of time engaging with Mary. If we do, we learned how from someone else, someone whose tradition offers a slant different from that of our own.

Maybe one of our children died, and someone said to us, "Mary." 

"No one mentions courage."

Courage is required: To accept a pregnancy, to push a child into the world, to let go of a small hand and watch it wave from a classroom door, to deposit a pile of luggage at camp, or college, or the airport.  Such commonplace events; no one mentions courage.

Courage is required: You do not know.  Until you do.

When I was in first grade in Florida, a little boy in my class suffocated on a balloon at a birthday picnic at the beach.  I remember the sound of the siren as the ambulance raced past our house that evening, before we learned what had happened.
 
This past week-end, a family lost a boy to suicide. "And so this is Christmas . . .".  One of my friends lost her son in the same way on Christmas Day itself, almost eleven years ago.

And for us, for me . . . Without Mary's courage, from Annunciation to Easter, what would there be?

You open to what comes.

You hope that there are iridescent wings.

Mary Oliver: A Thousand Mornings

I am reading as I write, so this isn't so much a book review as an expression of joy in the publication of a new volume of poetry by Mary Oliver.

If I recall correctly, my first introduction to Mary Oliver came courtesy of my daughter's 11th grade English teacher, who used her allotted 20 minutes or so on Parents' Night to teach us (the parents) a brief lesson on "Praying" in order to demonstrate what she was doing with our young people.   ("It doesn't have to be the blue iris . . . ".)

That would have been in the fall of 2003.  Since then, Mary Oliver's poems have had a way of popping up in ways that, could I list them all, would probably form themselves into an outline of many of the most significant people in my life.

Which poem do I love the most?  I don't know.  These are the lines I tend to quote:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

(from "Wild Geese") 



She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child,
And amazing things can happen.

(from "Love Sorrow")

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

(from "Heavy") 

 

And now, in a new gift:

But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be if it isn't a prayer? 

(from "I Happened To Be Standing")

 

This last reminded me of my grandmother, whose clothespin bag, hanging on the line, was rendered useless on more than one occasion by nesting wrens.

Mary Oliver, of course, would remind us to question our definitions of usefulness and uselessness.  What could possibly be more useful than wren parents who have set up housekeeping in a clothespin bag? 

As we stood beside my grandmother's grave a few winters ago, listening to my daughter sing, a Carolina wren blended his voice with hers.  What else could it be, but a prayer?

More Interior Design

A few days ago, I posted some pictures from my church office, and promised (?) that there would be more.  Herewith, the more:

You can see that it's a small place.  I use it to meet with people ~ it's a cozy place for conversation ~  but when I'm working on something that involves research and writing, I need a lot more room to spread out.  And there's no room for my books books books. I moved one of the curtains because light is essential to my well-being.

When I headed for seminary, some of my friends asked what I'd like for a going-away gift.  (I was coming back in four days!)  I asked for a framed copy of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, Kindness ("Before you know what kindness is, you must lose things."  Umm-hmm.):

Last fall, I went to a spiritual directors' continuing ed day on art and spiritual direction, and left with one of the presenter's mandalas.  The colors made me think Spring! on a dreary and rainy October afternoon:

And this is one of my favorite ordination gifts, from a reader who prefers to correspond off-blog:

Sorry about the lighting.  The book is called And Grace Will Lead Me Home and it presents a collection of artistic interpretations of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, now housed at Luther Seminary.  It's one of those books which you approach an image or a page or two at a time, and of course it immediately got me to thinking: Should I start a collection of images and three-dimensional artwork focused on the Woman at the Well?  I'm a little afraid that someone might decide to unload a full-sized well on me, or a collection of antique buckets!  And where would those go ?!

The Musician (A Poem for Good Friday)

A memory of Kreisler once:

At some recital in this same city,

The seats all taken, I found myself pushed

On to the stage with a few others,

So near that I could see the toil

Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth

Fluttering under the fine skin,

And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,

Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,

As we sat there or warmly applauded

This player who so beautifully suffered

For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary

In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:

The men standing by and that one figure,

The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,

Making such music as lives still.

And no one daring to interrupt

Because it was himself that he played

And closer than all of them the God listened.

~ R.S. Thomas

Wild Geese

Many, many years ago ~ I am sure that it was October, 1979, so: 32+ years ago ~ I crawled through our small tent opening into the cold air of Isle Royale as skein after skein of geese rose into the sky above Lake Superior.  That I remember that moment with the clarity with which the tangerine colors of the sunrise pierced the darkness of the early morning sky is a testament to one of the few natural gifts with which I was born: a capacity to notice and appreciate that which I saw around me.  

It's no wonder that, when the time was right, it was the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola, with his emphasis on words like repetition and savor,  that called out to me.

When my children were growing up, my approach to mothering was: Notice and Appreciate.  From what they tell me, I was not entirely successful in communicating that dimension of my interior life.  Their memories seem rather fixated on some of the daily expectations that were, in truth, the least significant things to me.  I suppose that the daily cycle of school, homework, soccer, and lessons did seem as if it were what life was made of, but what I was constantly aware of was the sunlight on blond hair, the giggles and meows in the hallway as cats fled to safety, the small bodies crouched over projects on kitchen tables and in creeks and lakes, the gleeful triumph when something was assembled or, much better, completely deconstructed.  I was never in any hurry for them to grow up, for school vacations to end, or for any of them to get on to the next phase, whatever that might have been.

The loss of that capacity, that ability to notice and appreciate, was the biggest consequence of the loss of Josh himself.  The entire universe, with its galaxies and colors and creative and loving people, went dim and flat three years ago. There have been moments, and even hours, of re-connection with hope and  joy ~ but the registry is at a level far below that at which I once lived.

This past week, in connection with the New Year, I've been thinking that I might like to recover some of my lost gift for awareness and gratitude. Or, perhaps more realistically, find a new version.  One of my friends just posted on FB that she loves New Year's and the way it makes her feel that anything is possible.  An entirely foreign thought to me. 

But maybe small things are possible.

St. Therese of Lisieux, the French Carmelite nun of the late 19th century, spoke of doing small things with great love rather than attempting great miracles.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an 18th century French Jesuit, focused upon The Sacrament of the Present Moment.

Franciscan  Richard Rohr's words have been making the rounds the past couple of days:  "Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, praising God until we ourselves are a constant act of praise"  (Radical Grace: Daily Meditations).

And Mary Oliver, of course, in her poem "Wild Geese," reminds us that

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Last night I dreamed that I was at camp in North Carolina, visiting The Lovely Daughter during one of her stints as a counselor.  I was supposed to meet Josh later for a river tubing trip, but in the meantime I was helping LD with her laundry.  She had lost a t-shirt she really liked, and I was going through pile after file of folded towels and clothing, peeling each item away from the others, one by one, in search of the missing t-shirt. 

I didn't find it before I woke up. 

Awareness. Gratitude.  Small things. Wild things. This moment.  A willingness to sift through the laundry, piece by piece, for something (or someone) not recoverable.

My word for this year, you may recall, is patience. 

I think that perhaps I will say a lot less and  photograph a lot more.
 

Image: Isle Royale Sunset, found here.