Who are we never without?

With the loss of a friend to glioblastoma I reflect on Mary’s pregnancy with a son who will be sacrificed.  Both bring to me the foolishness that we can "get over" losing someone.


And both bring me hope.

A now-cancelled series entitled “A Gifted Man” involved an individualistic, insensitive but brilliant neurosurgeon who was regularly visited by the spirit of his recently departed ex-wife, who was, as you might suspect, brilliant but compassionate and altruistic.  The nuance and effectiveness of the show came through in an episode in which what seemed to be a brain tumor in a patient turned out to be a chimera, cells of the undeveloped attached twin.  This chimera is a rare form of something we can all recall. 

When I was a boy, there was a story on TV about Siamese twins, and the dilemma of separation surgery.  Would the attempt to separate them, allowing them to live a normal life, be worth the risks of surgery?  I recall being struck (as a boy in a large family) that they could not get away from each other, that they were without the freedom to go on with their individual lives.  How often in our lifelong marriage have Kathy and I freed each other to do things without each other by saying that after all, “we’re not joined at the hip”.

The surface issue of the cancelled series was the visits by his wife, who completed him.  The deeper layer in this episode was the reality of the connectedness of the “other”; removal of the chimeric “tumor” was seen as a dilemma.  The young boy, even as he was besieged by the “voice” in his head as the tumor pressed on the hearing centers of his brain, mourned for the loss of his twin that surgery would require. 

A friend reminded me yesterday that the priest who presided at his father’s funeral had said in his homily “God so respects relationships that when we lose someone we love, he never fills the hole.”

Authentic life includes these holes, the places once inhabited by the physical presence of another.  In the mystery of life as this priest, Fr. Norm Dickson, S.J., proposed, grieving is not a matter of going on with our individual lives severed from their memory, but of embracing the gift that they remain to us, even as a hole.

Are we ever alone, really?  The word alone is from the Old English words alla ana…all one.  We can be lonely, focusing on our sense of alone-ness, but that is a dangerous delusion. 

We are not alone.  Going on is not a matter of going alone.  We are joined at the heart. 

Here is a reminder from e.e cummings – thanks to Bill Hickey for inhabiting me with this.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

by e.e.cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

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.