An Eternity Together

This Sunday’s Gospel invites us to continue circling the tree in the morning mist, trying to find the bird that is making the music that slows our pulse, softens our step, and pushes back on our preoccupations and worries and fears, as long as we keep listening.  Jesus is talking with his disciples again about being gone, and remaining.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he begins, knowing that this is not a head trip, but a journey of consideration by the softer part of his male companions, the more vulnerable.  He will leave them.  All of us leave each other, don’t we?   We know this is true because we have been left by others, others who have been parents or friends, or God help us, children. 

Jesus is leaving, but he will remain, he says.  And in this is our greatest hope, of never being abandoned, never being alone.  The film “Cherry Blossoms” finds Rudi, losing his wife as we who watch know something that he does not, that he himself is dying.  That we know allows us to see his days of living after his Trudi’s death as his most precious.  And in these days, he circles the tree in the mist of death and listens to the silence, and tells his children “I want to know where Trudi is!”

In life, she attempted to dance him, to bring him to the miracle of the moment, to the intimacy of touch and movement, of being one.  It was not until she was gone that he allowed himself to be surrounded by her, to be drawn in to her, to understand that he and she were indeed one.

Perhaps it is the same with us Christians, we who struggle with the “gone-ness” of Jesus and circle the tree in the silence and mist, trying to recall the song that we have heard sung from time to time, wondering if there ever really was a bird, or if it was just our imagination.  We want to know where God is!

And here He is all along, so inextricably wound in us, in the love that is beyond imagining, but is hinted at by duets in dance and song.  Perhaps that is why it is these duets that can move us to tears?  Perhaps it is the insinuation of voices and arms that are the notes of that birdsong finding our ears through the mist of our hoping.  Yes, it is real.  It is not just my imagination.