“What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap,
that the dead are gone absolutely from this world.
As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to
see them here anymore, ever.
Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good.
Any questions you think of that you ought to’ve asked while you had a chance
are never going to be answered.
The dead know, and you don’t.
And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before.
You even maybe know them better than you did before.
They stay with you, and in a way you go with them.
They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart knows them.
As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside.
If the dead had been alive only in this world, you would forget them,
looks like, as soon as they die.
But you remember them,
because they always were living in the other, bigger world while
they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same.
You can’t see this with your eyes looking straight ahead.
It’s with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it.
The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead,
the better I see it.
I am telling what I know.
It’s our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two.”
“...There wasn’t a body to be spoken over and buried to bring people together,
and to give Tom’s life a proper conclusion in Port William.
Berry, Wendell -
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William
-----------------------------
Words from the Wasteland
(actually Little Gidding, but our words reflect everywhere we have have ever been)
10 years ago I could have read these words and thought them quite beautiful and poignant and admired the simplicity of his prose conveying a most complex, but common human experience.
My experience of death and loss was not, what would you call it, ripe, yet.
Sure I could write about it, but the words were just cover for rage, confusion, and nowhere near anything like knowledge.
I was stuck in those early stages of kubler-ross’ death and dying…pretending to be on the other side of “acceptance”.
Today, I think I can honestly say I am finally there.
It’s the “It’s our separateness and our grief that break the world in two.” that’s the clincher.
That’s a place you can’t pass over and not know you are in it…mostly because it turns everything you knew for certain to chaff.
“But you remember them,
because they always were living in the other, bigger world while
they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same.”
Then all those “childish things” that you put away, because you had pronounced yourself no longer a child, MOCK THE HELL OUT OF YOU and you must recover that childlike humility, because that is what you still are…no matter how many candles are on the cake.
Then, in that humility you remember the rest of the story…”For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
No matter what we see in that glass or mirror-(ἔσοπτρον really doesn’t translate well-but if you ever were in a museum and looked in what they called a “mirror” ages ago-it’s doesn’t resemble anything like the “modern” one of the same name), it is still dark, distorted, and imperfect and always will be this side of life.
The old theological canard of the “now and not yet of the kingdom of god” has bitten you in the back-parts, again.
Berry’s simple words define a complex reality of concentric places of being…..
“But you remember them,
because they always were living in the other, bigger world while
they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same.”
And even though you are always at home, ‘hidden in Christ’, doesn’t mean you can’t get lost…and I was, and I am, and may always be.
Then I hang on to the words of another wise writer-
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
Little Gidding V,
Four Quartets.