"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery..." - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek .
Cross-legged before a campfire about fifty years ago, I heard a counselor read Saxon Kessinger's poem "The Indispensable Man." The image I recall lives in this odd second verse:
"...Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining,
Is a measure of how much you'll be missed."
My teen-aged self was startled. I thought I mattered, that I might even become a "great" man. Instead, my life was as evanescent as a ripple in the night-dark lake beyond the flames.
Suddenly shipwrecked on the island of humility, I couldn't tell whether I felt better or worse. How marvelous to submit to God. But, what was I to do if my life was no more than "a faint tracing on the surface of mystery"?
"We must somehow take a wider view," Dillard advises. "...If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation."
I take Dillard's words to mean that everything in the world is miraculous. Why not live with passion?
"...beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there," she writes.
One study reflects that many of us peak at nineteen. After that, most give up. Passion falls victim to safety. Creative energy fades.
What a tragedy.
Passion is our option. We can choose to do as little as possible or we can engage each other and the world. We can live all of our years instead of just the first nineteen.
If we are only a "faint tracing" we can choose to do good for its own sake. Not because acts of compassion will make some lasting mark on the face of the temporal world, or even that we will win God's favor.
Every day, caregivers have the sweet chance to meet the needs of another. Every night, we can thank the hand of Love for cradling us through another day. Every dawn, we can renew our passion to encounter the world with all its cruelty and grace as a holy place.
We have to make an effort. We have to choose a full life rather than to retreat into the half-light of the guarded heart.
How are we doing training our ears to listen to the guidance of poets and seers who bring us hard-won messages that cannot be decoded with simple glances? The artists and saints of the world have glimpsed the mystery and brought back news. Beauty and Grace lie without and within.
"The least we can do is try to be there" when they arrive. The most we can do is make the "extravagant gesture," to open our spirits, and even to open the door to others with whom we may share Love's glory.
-Erie Chapman
Photograph - Eyes Study 4c - copyright Erie Chapmand 2010
