Our children arrive tomorrow for the holiday. I’m happy about that….I haven’t seen them in six months. Their coming has caused me here in late mid life, in the waning light of Fall, to take stock of things that make this earth heaven:…their gracious friendship…my wife who loves me more than I deserve…my mother who believes in me…the work I get to do, and this fine parish within which I get to do it…the beauty of this city by the bay…the rusting sedge of the delta…the Spanish moss…the glide of the pelican…I could go on… but also there is grief in this season…I miss my father…friends dead and gone…unresolved family quarrels…our own coming death…joy and pain held together in a sweet mystery indissoluble.
Ambiguity is the rhythm of life…the light and the dark, necessary for each other…artful contrast at the heart of our knowing, and our being…we are not whole without the whole of it: controversy and resolution; regret and joy; anguish and restoration; love and death.
Our culture would tell us otherwise, that life is supposed to be all bright, all happiness, but where is the art in that? Ours is to own the ambiguous beauty of life in earth, for such is the way of heaven: beauty made manifest among the light and the dark textures of existence. beauty, not just at the surface, but beauty that has the resonance to transform and create…the ambivalent shadow-side of life mere birth pangs of the new. So I give thanks for the whole of it…the whole of life’s experience…the whole that God calls and celebrates as very good.
