| Life |
LIFE - the temptation is always to reduce it to size. A bowl of cherries. A rat race. Amino acids. Even to call it a mystery smacks of reductionism. It is the mystery.
As far as anybody seems to know, the vast majority of things in the universe do not have whatever life is. Sticks, stones, stars, space - they simply are. A few things are and are somehow alive to it. They have broken through into Something, or Something has broken through into them. Even a jellyfish, a butternut squash. They're in it with us. We're all in it together, or it in us. Life is it. Life is with.
After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. "There is only one miracle," he answered. "It is life."
Have you wept at anything during the past year?
Has your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty?
Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday you are going to die?
More often than not, do you really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?
Is there anybody you know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself?
If your answer to all or most of these questions is no, the chances are that you're dead.
~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
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This year I went to the Frederick Buechner Writer's Workshop. I didn't learn to write like this but I did learn a deeper appreciation for Mr. Buechner, who did write the piece I used. Each day I receive a small snippet from him and like some of us, I look at the abundance in my inbox and delete things without reading.
I'm glad I stopped today and read this one.
I woke this morning in the seventeenth bed of this trip. I left my home and bed in April. I've been with beloved children and grandchildren, a reconnected cousin, a friend of a friend, old friends and family with shared history and new friends to create story with. I've stayed in a 1904 foursquare in Bismarck, a mid-century Seattle split foyer, a Virginian ranch with chickens running free, a brick cottage in Georgia with a wedding in the back yard and a house in the suburbs. I enjoyed a DC mansion and a Connecticut beach cottage, a rambling Pennsylvania home with almost newly weds and a Pittsburgh rowhouse with an seasoned married couple!
As I sit here remembering, I didn't count the second stay in Ohio where I have my own room with some history but did add in the Milwaukee Air BnB and now...the bedroom of a dear friend's child. I feel loved and connected with people in each place. Even in the one hotel because I shared it with one of my dearest friends in the world. In thirty-six years of friendship, sharing a hotel room alone may be a first. She'll remember.
But all this would be just an extended sightseeing vacation if I hadn't been loved and tried to show love along the way. I sat at the bedside of a man I have loved since we were children and prayed for his life. I hugged his wife with gratitude. I embraced my daughter and felt the new life forming in her. I listened to a friend's confession of unforgiveness and we cried together for shared losses.
If I hadn't rejoiced in the birth of the baby in Milwaukee and been present with the grands, if I hadn't wept with my friend over the success of her transplant and with another over the pain in her marriage, if I hadn't listened; all this would be just passing through.
I don't want to pass through on my trips and I don't want to pass through life.
I don't want to reduce it or dismiss the Mystery.
I want to be alive;
fully alive,
pain and strange beds and all.
A heart full of gratitude to all who have welcomed me in this summer.
