I thank Thee

This is not the column I had drafted for you this week. The timing of the other one is off. I write out of my heart and sometimes where my heart is I sense may not be where the rest of the world is at any given time.

There is , of course, also the possibility and reality that my heart has shifted this week. I did not need to win the megamillions lottery because I recently received an opportunity to learn information which would so change my life for the better it allowed me to lay down one entire path of forward motion and veer to another. In a heartbeat, I might add.

For days now, all I can say is ‘Thank you’. The poem from ee cummings keeps coming to mind and heart and soul and spirit and even my limping along body:

i thank you God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how could tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable YOU?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

It’s dangerous for a poor proofreader like myself to include an ee cummings poem in my column. I mean I supposed I could claim poetic license every time I leave off an item of grammar, but I decided to risk it because… well… doesn’t it just say it all?

Like I told you in the last column, I did make my way to St Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral for Vigil. In the shadows, in the darkness, with all thousand or so of us sitting holding our long tapirs to guide us through the first half of the service you could see uptop of us streams of arcing cloth running from the old rose window out to the chandeliers. When the Eucharist came and the lights were brought up (when Easter had arrived) there was the most splendiferous burst of colour over head. I slunk down in my pew, lifted up my phone camera and clicked two pix. They utterly and completely captured my gratitude for new life, redemption, transformation, a long obedience in a single direction ( pardon me Eugene Peterson) . I look at them over and over again while reciting what words I remember from the ee cummings poem. I thank, I thank, I thank, I thank, I thank.

There is a Christmas carol that has the line, ‘no more let sin and sorrow rule’.

Stop and take a memory shot of what your driveway or the street in front of your abode looked like in the snow. Lo the winter is past.

Now those of you who read me regularly know that I’m not given to theological platitudes often, but look at those buds blooming. Smell those pollens, tear up with the newness of Spring that also makes you cough and sneeze.

To completely enjoy the life changing gratitude, you have to let go of winter. Sink into the greens and pinks, and whites and yellows and purples and oranges and reds. Let go of gray and brown and glistening frozen white.

Do you remember when you thought you couldn’t stand one more minute in the cold? Do you remember when we thought we would all drown if it didn’t stop raining immediately?

You DID stand it. We DIDN’T drown.

I agreed to let life happen. Eyes open, Ears hearing, I thank thee, I thank thee, I thank thee.

Love,
Deborah