Invisible Connections

Many have been very kind to me in this time of "being between," their kindnesses often consisting of reminders of what I have NOT lost... I've needed to hear them, since the vacuum created by what I have lost can fill my focus like a Black Hole, and draw into it light from the other stars that still do shine in my heavens.

Among other things, I have not lost my ability to read, nor my ability to learn, nor, as I sometimes fear most, a good quantity of what I had already learned, but perhaps left unused in the attics of my mind.

I was reminded of what I knew but I'd forgotten that I knew in reading Annie Dillard's new book, The Maytrees. It is a glorious read, more a prose poem than a novel in the way she uses language. And she surprises in her references, such as the quote that leads the Epilogue: "Nothing restores the sense of being alive less ambiguously than the birth of the unexpected, the finding of a person who one did not know one loved so much." This, authored by Ralph Harper, in his book On Presence.

I was joyed that Dillard had read On Presence, and that she'd drawn from it this wonderful line. It made me feel a connection with her. Let me trace the heritage: I'd read On Presence years ago, in 1990 or '91. I was pleased to find that someone else, Ralph Harper, had written about the man on whom I'd done my dissertation, Gabriel Marcel. The concept of "presence" was significant to Marcel, and Harper had taken it in a direction I'd appreciated. He'd even connected "presence" to "story" in a way similar to what I'd done in my dissertation! I was pleased to see that someone else had seen what I'd seen.

Not only did I appreciate On Presence intellectually, but I also appreciated it emotionally. I read the book shortly after I'd come to California to serve my second church. I had already begun to put away many of the ideas I had been working on when I was at University. I think I'd begun to shrink-wrap my intellectual vitality. Reading On Presence reminded me that I was still alive from the neck up-- no small consolation for someone who'd lived in that part of himself for the most part for the better part of some 13 years!

So now this little book shows up in a novel I'm reading, and I'm feeling that an otherwise obscure thread from one part of my life is woven into another-- and there is a kind of burst of bonuses! Suddenly I feel that maybe I'm not as dead from the neck up as I worried I was. More, I'm reminded that my intellectual inquiry might have actually taught me something!

Then, later on in the chapter, Dillard references Aristotle's There Will Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow, the wonderful meditation on our capacity for truth. And I remember that someone I knew in seminary was writing his dissertation on that text. And my past is once again relevant in my present. And I feel comforted: I have lost less than I feared...

I realize that these re-minders (that I still have a mind--that I have lost my mind, anyway) might seem a little abstract, but the experience of finding little reminders from my past now meaningful in my present-- this is why our memories are so important: the invisible connections that re-member US, that hold us together, that restore in us a sense that our lives have been continuous, even amid the changes, even when the changes have been cataclysmic.

Today I am thankful for two related things: First, that I have had the time to read, which I seldom did when my work was consuming my days. And second, that in the reading I am re-minded and re-membered and in a real way, re-paired.

It is all part of the Mystery and the Blessing...