The One Cry

This is the chapter that made me cry. Not for what she found, but for what she lost...

Sister to truck, self to night fears, mother to asylum, daughter to time.

The words stay with me...

How long until we are gone?
If I don't close eyes, I won't die.
Why can't I hold on to now forever?

And in the center of it all, as a young woman, she courted death with shards of glass, bled onto the floor. It is that bleeding I want to stay with. That cry of "I don't want to die," even as it looks like death-invitation.

This is the cry of humanity, is it not? This is why we bleed each other, is it not? (Why can't I hold on to now forever?)

Jesus never gloried in death. He raised the dead, wept over them, asked to be exempt from his own. He made space for lament, became lament itself. He gave life-blood.

If I close my eyes, I can see Him holding Ann to his heart. "I'm sorry," he is whispering in her ear. "I am so, so sorry."

___

Quotes from Chapter 8 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

Coin

Trying to write today, about the relationship of grief and joy (like two sides of a coin), about true celebration. I find this quote and realize I won't have room to include it. But I want to draw it out from the piles and piles of notes, keep it, meditate on it, ask You about it...

The experience of joy is so incredibly rare…because it entails a constant giving up in order to even recognize the territory. We prefer to return to those states of seminumbness with which we are more familiar…. The rare appearance of joy… is so painfully exquisite that we may actually experience joy as a moment of terror. It opens to us all our possibilities and yet casts a shadow of comparison across all our other moments. Joy brings an intimation of death and mortality. This joy will pass as all others have before them. Laughter catches in our throat because we refuse to accept the corollary of joy, the soul-enriching poignancy of loss.

I think I understand now why joy has so often eluded me. Ah, that You would give me courage to face the griefs, that I might embrace more fully the joys.