Friday, December 30, 2005

Grace on the Journey

As we hover on the cusp of the old year and the new, in these darkest days of winter, I am pulled between the year’s terrible losses – earthquakes, torture, war, hurricanes, floods, and personal tragedies – and the love and light that somehow keep us afloat.  I recently visited Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, and so I’ve been holding in my mind’s eye the enormous female sea turtle in the big central tank.  Have you seen her?  When you’re pressed up against the cool glass walls, distracted by the confetti colors of the darting tropical fish, the sea turtle looms into your perspective like a Mother Ship, like a rising sun, with other-worldly grace and pacing.  You can’t take your eyes off her as she pulls through the water, tipping her mottled carapace just as she glides past, taking your breath with her.

In fact, until the diver in the tank mentions through his bubbling microphone that in the wild she was struck by a boat propeller that paralyzed her back legs, you don’t even notice that she is badly damaged.  Look closer, though, and you’ll see that it’s true; her back legs don’t work.  But they don’t just dangle uselessly; they wave and swirl elegantly in the water currents, responding to energies invisible to us.  They seem to be on a beautiful, musing journey of their own that is quite different from the steady, rhythmic pull of her muscular front legs.

As the days have grown darker, I’ve meditated on the way this great creature displays her tragedy, her damage, and yet is somehow more graceful in unexpected ways because of that wounding.  Who among us doesn’t carry with us signs of tragedy?  But how many of us can see the ways we’re more graceful, for all our wounds?

As I hear myself say these words, though, I’m already mounting a critique, and perhaps you are, too.  There’s so much pap out there about silver linings, windows opening when doors close, and growing stronger from whatever doesn’t kill us.  Try shopping for a sympathy card and tell me if you ever find one you can stomach.  Sometimes loss is just loss.  Sometimes we don’t get more noble, or gain deeper insight.  Sometimes the bones don’t knit better or stronger than before the break ... the damage is permanent.  No bright side; only wintery darkness.

The most important lesson I learned as a college student was from a grand, elderly Chaucer professor, who, no doubt responding to some private pain, broke off from her Middle English lecture one wintery class day to wag a finger, admonishing us, “When someone dies, don’t ever say to the grieving family, ‘Well, at least you’ve had this,’ or ‘Time will heal that...’ Don’t try to make it better. You can only say that you’re sorry. Nothing more.” At age 20, when I still believed everything had a bright side, I found this shocking.  Now that I’m closer to 40, the lesson has begun to rhyme with sobering experience.  Some kinds of damage, like the deaths of those close to us, truly never heal. And yet we see everywhere examples of damaged people moving with grace, responding to currents and eddies that may not be visible but are felt, nevertheless.

In the latest film version of C.S. Lewis’s classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the wicked White Witch murders the noble lion, Aslan, she utters the sneering words: “So much for love.” During this agonizing scene, when goodness itself is scorned and bloodied, I glanced over at my daughters’ faces, strained and damp in the dim light of the movie screen. They understood.  Even if you don’t believe in the Deep Magic that Aslan represents in Narnia, you can see that the Witch is evil incarnate because of those damning words: “So much for love.” We may not be able to take away pain, but what do we have but love to beat back the demons and the darkness?  I like to think this is what the sea turtle’s damaged back legs are responding to in that tank in Chicago – they flutter gracefully on the currents and eddies of the love around her.  She may not see it, but her body moves differently because of that swirling energy.

In this cold hour, when our part of the world has turned its face most fully from the sun, and dead winter stretches before us, what better vow might we make for the new year but to help one another see our unlikely, unexpected loveliness as we pull ourselves forward?  What better resolution could there be than tocreate currents of love to help our fellow creatures make the journey with grace?  What strange beauty might we all be trailing in our wake?

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on December 30, 2005
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