Dear friend,
I had a plan for this week's newsletter, but some circumstances of our life made it impossible to follow through on the grandiose words I could have written. Instead, here are a few poems I'm thinking about these days. They are poems written in another season, but applicable to this one. I hope they meet you were you are.
The “Hope” piece, in particular, is one I turn to often – the image of hope laughing next to grief, like two members of a dinner party, is vivid in my mind's eye. This is not only due to our present circumstances but because much of life is lived in that tension.
They say grief is love;
love bewildered, love stopped short of its destination.
Where does grief go for people of resurrection?
It cannot rest in empty words;
it will not abide pithy platitudes.
You try to prepare for it
but nothing prepares you for a missing face in photos
or when they don’t come waving out from the barn.
There is no hardening to such an absence—
carved out, hollowed deep.
Even hope-filled hollows hurt.
Even resurrection requires death.
Even Jesus wept at the tomb.
So to grieve with hope
a love with nowhere to go
must meet the Love that will not let us go,
and there, so slowly,
the grieving heart
finds final home.
They Say Grief is Love, PDM
We asked for complete wholeness
and you chose to give it
the way we did not want.
Standing graveside was not in our plans or prayers,
but here we worship—
because wholeness was accomplished
and healing is complete.
We Asked for Healing, PDM
Hope can live and breathe at a dinner table
seated next to grief
and laugh, somehow, at the future
while weeping
at the present.
Hope, PDM
