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Feb. 14, 2007 The Parish Minister’s Column The Rev. Barbara J. Pescan “My work is loving the world.” This is the first line of the first poem in Mary Oliver’s new book of poems, Thirst.
It seems so expected a thing in winter to bundle up, hunch your shoulders and, with dread, go out into the low temperatures and the dry air. It seems so normal a thing to gripe about the weather, grey slush, your car’s and your own sluggish starts. We do it without thinking; we do it because that’s the chatter on offer.
I turned on the map light to find my black gloves on the black floor mat of the car Friday evening, The light was on all night, it turned out, and the battery just clicked at me Saturday morning as I tried to leave for an appointment. To make a long story short, they came to my home for the appointment; AAA sent a truck and the gentleman charged the battery; it failed again Sunday morning; Angie came to get me for church; Monday, Robb and his friend, Jack, came to give the car a jump; I drove to the dealership and bought a new battery.
I could complain about the whole process, but I would be an ingrate if I did. Two people I know have spoken lately about, among other things, their long marriage, their good children, their good life together, and attributed a good deal of it to how lucky they have been. (I suspect that, more than only luck, it is the capacity to recognize the good and cooperate with it … .) So, hearing them speak, witnessing them tell about their lucky lives worked in me from the first battery clicking noises Saturday through Angie’s coming to get me, to Tuesday when I saw them again, and told them, and saw Robb at church, and gave him a hug.
The weather is miserable. Our nation is at war. Children shoot each other with automatic weapons. The leaders of our country are seen here and abroad as moral lightweights. Molly Ivins has died. And, we must comfort our own, those close to us, whose loved ones have died this year, at home, in the hospital, in this (expletive of your choice) war.
What if, I wonder, somewhere deep beyond -1º, I begin the day un-hunched, open-armed, un-armed. “My work is loving the world,” she wrote, in the book published in the year after her life-partner died. A poem about being alive in this world, about gratitude, about living forever now, in the forever we can be sure of.
And, if we are still feeling like shaking our fists at the world, let’s do it with our ten fingers aflame, in the direction of something that deserves it, let’s yell where it will do some good. Molly Ivins said: Go forth unafraid. Raise hell. And, have a good time. And, at the end of our life, let’s have someone say of us, with Robert Frost, "I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
See you in church, Barbara
Unitarian Church of Evanston
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