This week marked the thirty-eighth anniversary of my mom’s death. My daughter, who never met my mother, was born twenty-six years from the date of her grandmother’s death. Since my daughter’s birth, this date has always had symbolic significance for me. I am very much aware that while life painfully takes away, it always seems generously to give back as well, however long the wait. Death is accompanied by signs of new life. Every winter gives way to the bloom of spring. Painful as certain moments and events are in our life, it is the awareness of these limitations, difficulties, and boundaries that, in fact, make life meaningful.
While it is true that such realities make some people endlessly bitter, it is true for others that the more aware they become of these realities, the more conscious they become of the sheer gratuity of life, of the many blessings that come their way each day in multiple shapes, sizes, and disguises, and of the imperative to live each day to its fullest. It is a truth well-worn that shiny-headed children in oncology wards are often “old souls.” What is it that makes them wise beyond their years? To answer “suffering” as if suffering automatically produced wisdom is, of course, naïve. Clearly it has to do with suffering. But is it not something more intricate and mysterious than that, something about the way suffering has the capacity to radically alter how sufferers see things if they but let it, something about the way suffering has the power to open wide their hearts to appreciate the simple gifts the rest of us take for granted if they dare to surrender their hearts?
However it comes, whether from pure determination and courage or as a gift of insight that rises to consciousness from deep within, I suspect it has to do with the combustion that comes when suffering and innocence are mixed, or with the rare progeny that are created when suffering and poverty of spirit conjoin. I suspect this unique coupling has a way of making people more vulnerable to grace, more susceptible to “quotidian mysteries,” more grateful for what is than resentful for what is not if we are open, daring, foolish, or trusting enough to do so. The wisest among us, whether saint or sage or shiny-headed youngster, allows the imperfections, struggles, and boundaries of existence to reveal to them what is really real, truly important, and utterly necessary. From what I can tell, what they recognize is the awareness the country curé came to understand in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest: tout est grace – “all is grace,” “everything is grace,” “all is gift.”
Poet Jane Kenyon came to a similar realization after being diagnosed with leukemia which, in a new and deeper way even than her years of depression, initiated her into the limitations and struggles of her body and mind, and to the imminent boundary of death.
Otherwise
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.*
It takes an act of imagination, courage, and surrender to allow the imperfections, struggles, and limitations of daily life to rouse us to the perfection, beauty, and grace that are all around us if we but have the ears to hear, the nose to smell, the body to feel, the tongue to taste, or the eyes to see such unearned bedazzlements as sweet milk, birch wood, dinner together, mate. Tout est grace.
PRACTICE:
Today pay attention to the simple gifts all around you and pray: “Thank you. It might have been otherwise.”
*from Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, Jane Kenyon