I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know.
I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I’ve lived longing for your ever look ever since. That longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body waxed. And the longing grows as the body wanes. The longing will outlive this body.
I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know.
Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes. And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant. That loneliness appeared on earth as this body. And my share of time has been nothing but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly. Your face fleeing my ever kissing it firmly once on the mouth.
In longing, I am most myself, rapt, my lamp mortal, my light hidden and singing.
I should have recognized you at first, but didn’t.
Once I looked you in the eyes, I knew that I had loved you from before I was born. It didn’t make sense to me but nevertheless I knew. Our longing in loneliness finally brought us face to face.
I handed you my heart and you handed me yours, to keep forever. And there they remain with utmost tenderness, our longings still being written.
…we all suffer. For we all prize and love; and in this present existence of ours, prizing and loving yield suffering. Love in our world is suffering love. Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving. This, said Jesus, is the command of the Holy One: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.
Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench. ~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son
Spring 1980
I wondered if 8:30 AM was too early to call my friend and mentor Margy. As a sleep-deprived fourth year medical student, I selfishly needed to hear her voice. I wanted to know how she was doing; she was not sleeping well either these days. She was wearing a new halo brace—a metal contraption that wrapped around her head like a scaffolding to secure her degenerating cervical spine from collapsing from metastatic breast cancer growth in her bones. When she was fitted into the brace, she named the two large screw-like fasteners anchored into her frontal skull her “Frankenstein bolts”. I had reassured her that with a proper white veil draped around the metal halo, she would be more suited to be Frankenstein’s bride.
Each patient I had seen the previous 24 hours while working in the Emergency Room benefited from the interviewing skills Margy had taught each one of us medical students. She reminded us that each patient had an important story to tell, and no matter how pressured our time, we needed to ask questions that gave permission for that story to be told. As a former nun now married with two teenage children, Margy had become our de facto counselor, and insisted physicians-in-training remember the soul thriving inside the broken and hurting body.
“Just let the patient know with certainty, through your eyes, your body language, your words, that you want to hear what they have to say. You can heal so much hurt simply by sitting beside them and caring enough to listen…”
Now with her recent diagnosis of metastatic cancer, Margy herself had become the broken vessel who needed the glue of a good listener. She continued to teach, often from her bed at home and I regularly visited, in need of her wisdom and she still needed her students.
That night I had felt uneasy about her all during my ER shift and felt compelled to visit her and her husband and daughter that day, maybe help out by cleaning their house, fixing them a meal or taking her for a drive as a diversion.
Her phone rang only once after I dialed her number. There was a long pause; I could hear a clearing of her throat. A deep dam of tears welled behind a muffled “Hello?” Something was deeply wrong.
Her voice shattered like glass into fragments, strangling on words that struggled to form. She sobbed out the words that their college son, Gordon, was dead. Earlier that morning, a police officer had knocked loudly on their door, awakening her and her husband with the news of a tragic highway accident.
I sat in stunned silence, listening to her sobs, completely unequipped to know how to respond. None of this made sense although I knew her son was on college spring break, heading to Mexico for a missions trip.
She paused and took in a shuddering breath.
“Gordy died as they were driving through the night. He was sleeping in the camper as they drove. They think he sleepwalked right out of the back of the moving camper, fell onto the highway and was hit by another car.“
I felt strangled by her words and could only imagine how difficult it was for her to keep breathing enough to say them.
“They’ll bring him home to us, won’t they? I need to know I can see him again. I need to tell him how much I love him.”
I assured Margy she would see him again, both in his broken body and, some day yet to be determined, whole.
Up until then, I knew in my head this life was full of sorrow, but I had been spared the full heart impact of grief until I witnessed such intensity of an acute unbelievable loss – how loving one so deeply meant suffering immeasurably.
I understood, for the first but surely not the last time, how it is the only way to love.
During the remaining few months of Margy’s life as she waited to join her son, she continued to teach me about how to come close in to the suffering and grief of others, and also how to sit together, even in silence, on that too-often lonesome mourning bench.
…for the Jude Veltkamp family who lost their teenage son, grandson, nephew, brother this week to a relentless cancer.
But our God is even more relentless in His love and comfort for His mourning children…
I knew this life was full of sorrow But still I believed That good times would follow That the evil would falter And true hearts would rise True hearts would rise That simple dream ended On the night that you died
And even the sound of a whistle fading Brings back the longing And stirs up the aching Peaceful companion that grounded my soul You grounded my soul The world spins without meaning Now that you’re gone
Sometimes I still think I will see you in New York And we will meet on the platform of the train And with your great leaning stride You’ll cross back to my side And my old life Will be my life again
You were quiet as a winter sky Where planets turn And the North Star rides My sweet brother, so reasoned, so calm My brother, my own The world spins without meaning Now that you’re gone ~Fernando Ortega
January’s drop-down menu leaves everything to the imagination: splotch the ice, splice the light, remake the spirit…
Just get on with it, doing what you have to do with the gray palette that lies to hand. The sun’s coming soon.
A future, then, of warmth and runoff, and old faces surprised to see us. A cache of love, I’d call it, opened up, vernal, refreshed. ~Sidney Burris “Runoff”
When I reach the end of January in all its grayest pallor, it is hard to imagine another six weeks of winter ahead. It can feel like nature offers only a few options, take your pick: a soupy foggy morning, a drizzly mid-day, a crisp northeast wind, an unexpected snow flurry, a soggy evening.
Every once in awhile the January drop-down menu will add a special surprise: icy spikes on grass blades, frozen droplets on birch branches, hair ice on wood, crystallized weeds like jewelry in the sun, a pink flannel blanket sunrise, an ocean-of-orange sunset.
Then I realize January’s gray palette is merely preparation for what has been hidden from me the whole time. There is Love cached away, and as it is revealed, it will not let me go.
photo of hair ice in King County, Washington taken by Laura Reifel
O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe, That in thy ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be.
O Joy that seeks me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee; I trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain, That morn shall tearless be. ~George Matheson
(“O Love” was inspired by the words of Scottish minister, George Matheson in 1882. Blinded at the age of nineteen, his fiancé called off their engagement and his sister cared for him as he endured new challenges. Years later, on the eve of his sister’s wedding, he faced the painful reminder of his own heartache and loss as he penned the words to this hymn.) from ElaineHagenborg.com
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All afternoon by the window, sunlight— that great soft hand on my head. I could hardly move. And the sun spoke. It said, There now. Maybe your heart is wiser than you think.
Afternoon slowly rolled into evening. I will listen for that voice all the days of my life. ~Annie Lighthart, “The Blessing” from Pax
I seek His hand on my head when I need reassurance – that glowing warm sensation as sunbeams soak through my scalp and calm my overwrought neurons. I can’t help but close my eyelids and bathe in the feeling that all things are made new, myself included, and everything is going to be okay.
Even as the sun fades with the passage of hours in the day, the warmth within me remains. I remember the touch, I remember the wisdom, I remember the encouragement, I promise I won’t forget.
I’ll keep listening for His voice and know His hand rests on my head.
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You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign? ~Louise Glück “Matins V”
I have never been a brave person. In fact, I can be as fearful of the headlines of world events as the next person – a downright lily-livered chicken-heart. People like me may engage in lots of magical thinking, hoping I just might change through hard work and a large measure of good luck.
But what has luck got to do with it? Nothing whatsoever.
The reality is, many people work hard and still face insurmountable struggles that regularly force them to their knees. Courage is asking God for the grit to keep going no matter what confronts you because that is exactly what He did for us: even when his knees hurt from kneeling, his voice was hoarse with prayer, his eyes full of tears, his efforts unacknowledged and unappreciated, his heart broken.
Even when I come up empty-handed, I take courage and take heart. His heart.
Take heart, my friend, we’ll go together This uncertain road that lies ahead Our faithful God has always gone before us And He will lead the way once again
Take heart, my friend, we can walk together And if our burdens become too great We can hold up and help one other In God’s love and God’s grace
Take heart my friend, the Lord is with us As He has been all the days of our lives Our assurance every morning Our defender in the night
If we should falter when trouble surrounds us When the wind and the waves are wild and high We will look away to Him who ruled the waters Who spoke His peace into the angry tide
He is our comfort, our sustainer He is our help in time of need When we wander, He is our Shepherd He who watches over us never sleeps
Take heart my friend the Lord is with us As He has been all the days of our lives Our assurance every morning Our defender in the night
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A silence slipping around like death, Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath, One group of trees, lean, naked and cold, Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold, One path that knows where the corn flowers were; Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir; And over it softly leaning down, One star that I loved ere the fields went brown. ~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”
Some ask for the world and are diminished in the receiving of it. You gave me only this small pool that the more I drink from, the more overflows me with sourceless light. ~R.S. Thomas “Gift”from Experimenting with an Amen
I am astonished my thirstiness is slaked by such simple things as a moment of pink in the sky, a burst of birdsong, a tree standing steadfast on the hill through the seasons, a glimpse of tomorrow over the fading horizon of today.
Even After All this time The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”
Look What happens With a love like that, It lights the Whole Sky. ~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”
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As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. ~William O. Douglasin a 1976 letter to Young Lawyers of the Washington State Bar Association
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.
We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” And he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
We must see this, believe this, and live by it… ~Martin Luther King Jr. from a sermon in A Knock At Midnight
Do you know why this world is as bad as it is? It is because people think only about their own business, and won’t trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light. My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt. ~Anna Sewell from Black Beauty
Dr. King’s words and wisdom still inform us of our shortcomings.
We flounder in brokenness despite our shared global neighborhood, despite an inescapable mutuality and commitment to brotherhood.
We still stand apart from one another; even as the bell tolls, we suffer divisiveness from a lack of humility, grace and love.
Perhaps today, for a day, for a week, for a year, we can unite in our shared tears: shed for continued strife and disagreement, shed for injustice that results in senseless killings, shed for our inability to hold up one another as brothers and sisters holy in God’s eyes.
We weep together as the light dawns on this day, knowing as Dr. King knew: a new day will come when the Lord God wipes tears away from all faces and all colors — a brotherhood created exactly as He intends.
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? ~Robert Hayden “Those Winter Sundays”
As a child growing up, I was oblivious to the sacrifices my parents made to keep the house warm, place food on the table, teaching us the importance of being steadfast, to crack the door of opportunity open, so we could walk through to a better life and we did.
It was no small offering to keep dry seasoned fire and stove wood always at the doorstep, to milk the cows twice a day, to grow and preserve fruits and vegetables months in advance, to raise and care for livestock, to read books together every night, to sit with us over homework and drive us to 4H, Cub Scouts and Camp Fire, to music lessons and sports, to sit together for meals, and never miss a Sunday to worship God.
This was their love, so often invisible, too often imperfect, yet its encompassing warmth splintered and broke the grip of cold that can overwhelm and freeze a family’s heart and soul.
What did I know? What did I know? Too little then, so much more now yet still – never enough.
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Awake the mind’s hopeless so At a quarter to six I rise And run 2 or 3 miles in The pristine air of a dark And windy winter morning With a light rain falling And no sound but the pad Of my sneakers on the asphalt And the calls of the owls in The cypress trees on Mesa Road
And when I get back you’re Still asleep under the warm covers Because love is here to stay It’s another day and we’re both still alive ~Tom Clark – “Every Day” from Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems.
How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know
each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now
we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves: how joyful to feel the heart quake
at the sight of a grandmother, old friend in the morning light, beautiful in her blue robe! ~Wendell Berry “The Blue Robe” from New Collected Poem
These winter mornings – waking early to part from your warm side, leaving behind my soft imprint, I wrap up in my robe to walk the gravel drive to deliver a letter to our mailbox.
Our hilltop farm lies silent amid fallow fields, moon shadows broad across my path star sparks overhead with orange paint beginning to lick awake the eastern mountain peaks.
I walk noiselessly; step out on the road then turn ~ startled as a flashlight approaches.
A walker and her dog illuminate me in my dawn disarray like a deer in headlights: my ruffled hair, my sleep-lined face. It is a grandma-caught-in-her-bathrobe surprise at sunrise and I’m simply glad to be alive.
A book of beauty in words and photos, available for order here:
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“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God.
May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night twenty nine years ago, but still no labor came as it should. Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. So a neighbor came to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow. Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly, threatening to let loose your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my aging and failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm and dug out from a drift: I celebrate when I hear your voice singing, and when your students love you as their teacher, knowing you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of blowing snow.
My annual retelling of the most remarkable day of my life when our daughter Eleanor (“Lea”) Sarah Gibson was born, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a snow and wind storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her. She is now married to her true love Brian who is another gift sent from the Lord; someday their hope for parenthood will come true for them as well.
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