Returning to the fold after Easter...

I LOVE this poem by Andrea Hollander.  After a mini-retreat last week, it was sweet to be back in community with my circle of faith colleagues.  We shared Eucharist, began with a simple "hymn-sing" (or liturgical stump the band), laughed a lot, talked about when we trust the Lord's resurrection and why we doubt it, too and then lifted prayers for one another and our broken world.  It was simple, real and beautiful.  Today it felt like we were God's people rejoicing at being together in grace through faith.

 

During our fellowship time, I was asked to pray for a woman whose husband is currently hovering between life and death.  Another old soul asked for help in finding an apartment.  And then some of us swapped stories about children growing up in very religious families and the funny games they play:  like my girls playing Mary giving birth to Jesus (both were delivered by hippies at home) or Dianne's baptist clan practicing "dunking" one another.  There was a time each year after Easter when on the trip to my parents house in Maryland, my daughters would sing prayer responses from the liturgy in the car and then see how quickly they could recite the standard prayer of confession from the Book of Common Prayer, too.

 

I'm going to take a nap soon - and then take the puppy out for a run.  But I came upon this poem and it fits on a day like today. 

 

What we don't know we don't know,
so accept it. If your mother wandered

when your father was stationed in France
during the war before you were born,

No matter what her sister told you
years later, after your mother died,

what does this matter now?
Your job anyway is to be the daughter,

to stay open to where you are,
your ear toward the glistening insects

that draw your eye to the wild azaleas
pushing their pale pink selves out of

the limestone ledge just over the edge
of the bluff where your house sits.

What you don't know
you will never know. Look instead

at the fluttering pink blossoms, at the lichen
stuck to the limestone ledge beneath them.

Look at the pale thumbprint of the moon
in the pale afternoon sky. The house is nearly

empty now, nearly no longer yours—
tables and chairs sold, couches and beds

given away, trash dumped, books and dishes
boxed and stacked for the truck

that's on its way. Everything is somewhere
else now, intact or scattered. It doesn't matter.

More than once your father wrote
from the field hospital about the nurses.

What was it like to read those letters?
These insects must be honeybees heavying

with nectar—so many lifting in and out
of the wild azaleas you can almost smell their

desire. Wild like your mother's may have been.
Like your husband's was. But you don't know

anything. You can sit on the porch
of this emptying house and think

whatever you think. You never apologized
for your own lies. Your husband apologized

too much. Even then the moon slept on its side,
its good ear deep in its pillow:

Your job was to be the wife and mother,
the daughter. To be whatever you are now.
The moon has its own job. The house
will fill again. Perhaps you are tired

of watching the bees. Of noticing how
the petals of the azaleas strain upward

to right themselves after the bees
have finished with them. Tired

of the questions that repeat themselves
like the fat predictable moon, and the doubt

that manages, no matter what the truth is,
to never run out.

May God be with you as this day unfolds...