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From the Rector:
Beyond easy answers
Dear Friends:
The words of my favorite Summer poem – Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” – float into my being at some point every year when the bees are buzzing and the grass is high.
This year, the poem has come to me as I have been preparing for the memorial service for TF Moore, beloved member of St. John | San Juan and friend to many.
Usually, the phrase in this poem that playfully tumbles around in my being is “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Right now, however, the phrase that rings in my ears and tugs at my heart is “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”
Indeed, TF died too soon. Too soon, and too young, and too unresolved.
We long for happy endings for our own lives and for the lives of those we love. We yearn for the sense of satisfaction that comes from fulfillment, accomplishment, completion. We also see happy endings as a sign of divine approval or blessing.
But life is complicated and God-who-loves-us knows this from their own incarnation. This God, our God, remains with us unconditionally, in and through it all, beyond this mortal life and on into eternity.
Sometimes a life ends the way most classical and popular music ends, with the final note being “the tonic.” A song written in the key of C major finishes on the note C; a song written in the key of A ends on A. Though grieving, a sense of peace mingles with our sadness.
Sometimes a life ends the way some folk music or jazz ends, on an unexpected note. When this happens, we are deprived of simple resolution and invited to awareness of unconditional interconnectedness beyond easy answers.
When things are resolved and when they’re not, may we be blessed with the courage to pay attention, to kneel, and to trust on the One who made us and who holds us, now and always.
Peace and prayers,
Janet+
The memorial service for TF will begin at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 18, in the sanctuary at St. John | San Juan and will be live-streamed here. A reception with time for remembrances will follow in the Parish Hall.
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
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