an open mind

Jordan, it seems, is always thinking of me and ways to make me smile.  I have been perusing books of Wendell Berry's poems from time to time, but haven't yet bought one despite my love of his work.  This week, when I stopped by to pick Jordan up from the coffee shop and shuttle him directly to the Boys and Girls Club, he handed me Berry's collection of poems entitled Given.

Here is an excerpt of Part III: Sabbaths VI

By expenditure of hope,
Intelligence, and work,
You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.
Within the darkness, all
Is being changed, and you
Also will be changed.

...

But won't you be ashamed
To count the passing year
At its mear cost, your debt
Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,
As you know well.  Nothing
Is given that is not
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.

The gift is balanced by
Its total loss, and yet,
And yet the light breaks in,
Heaven seizing its moments
That are at once its own
And yours.  The day ends
And is unending where 
The summer tanager,
Warbler, and vireo
Sing as they move among
Illuminated leaves.

 It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to understand the cost of time, of a year.  As Berry says, "Nothing is given that is not taken, and nothing taken that was not first a gift."  The delight of receiving a gift of grace inevitably becomes the ache of loss.  I swing dramatically back and forth between a posture of indifference and terror as I engage with the things and the people I have been given.  Indifference because I forget their value and their finite nature; terror because, when I realize these things, I find myself desperately grasping for control.  Less frequently, I assume a posture of awe-struck gratitude.  Those are my best days.  Rather, my best moments.  I find that position to be difficult to maintain; it pinches and stretches parts of me that I would prefer to leave alone.

But today, in this year, I am inexplicably grateful.  (And, it should be said, rather uncomfortable.)  We celebrate a year since my mother's radical mastectomy, a surgery that frightened us all, but left her without cancer.  It was this day a year ago that I sat, waiting, wondering.  What was happening?  What would happen?  What would they find?  Why is the phone not ringing, it has been an hour longer than they told us to expect...  It was this day a year ago that my dad sat with me in the waiting room, only leaving long enough to make his way to the gift shop to buy my mom an anniversary gift, a stuffed animal to keep with her when we all had to go home that night.  Today, we also celebrate a 42nd year of married life for my parents.  Today is a precious, precious gift from a merciful and loving Creator. 

We cannot hold on to anything for long.  It is all passing, here one moment and gone the next.  We hold on to things and people, and they pass through our hands.  But this is where I disagree with Berry.  I do not believe that the gift is balanced by total loss.  I believe that the gift, although taken, continues to give strength and comfort.  Loss, I, perhaps naively, hope, is tipped by the gift on the scale.  

I am learning, although slowly, that I must practice a posture of awe-struck gratitude.  This, as with so much in life, is a discipline.  A difficult and sometimes painful discipline.  Yet, I believe that it is one that leads us to see more clearly "Heaven seizing its moments...at once its own and yours."

"...And yet the light breaks in...the day ends and is unending..."