Tag: compassion

Man is born broken.
He lives by mending.
The grace of God is glue.
~Eugene O’Neill

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.
~Mary Oliver “The Journey”

When I first read <Mary’s poem> years ago, I had trouble with it. It seemed to advocate the kind of self-centered life that’s one of the core pathologies of modern culture.

But life experience—hard experience—has led me to see the wisdom here. None of us can “mend” another person’s life, no matter how much the other may need it, no matter how much we may want to do it.

Mending is inner work that everyone must do for him or herself. When we fail to embrace that truth the result is heartbreak for all concerned.

What we can do is walk alongside the people we care about, offering simple companionship and compassion. And if we want to do that, we must save the only life we can save, our own.

Only when I’m in possession of my own heart can I be present for another in a healing, encouraging, empowering way. Then I have a gift to offer, the best gift I possess—the gift of a self that is whole, that stands in the world on its own two feet.

…anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others.
~Parker Palmer writing about Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey”

We are born hollering,
so abruptly separated
from warmth and comfort.
Broken in emptiness
from the first breath,
every alveoli fills up
with the air of a fallen world.

Yet air is never enough for us.

The rest of our days are spent
filling up our empty spaces
whether lungs
or stomach
or starving synapses,
still hollering in our loneliness
and heart-
broken.

I spent over forty years
devoted to the mending business,
patching up the breaking and broken.

Yet I know I was never enough.

We heal best
through our walk with others
who are also broken.
We bridge the gaps
by knitting together scraggly fragments
of each other’s shattered lives.

The crucial glue is
boiled from gifted Grace –
our filled holes miraculously made holy.

So it is – Immanuel, God with us, is always enough.

There was an old woman of long ago who went about her mending;
She sewed the wind against the clouds to stop the trees from bending;
She stitched the sun to the highest hill, to hold the day from ending.

Her thimbles and threads were close at hand for needlework and quilting,
For sewing gardens to the sky to keep the blooms from wilting,
For lacing the land to the crescent moon, to save the world from tilting.