Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for Date October 29, 2006

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

November

In a poem dedicated to his deceased Irish mother, Seamus Heaney remembers simple things about her: And don't be dropping your crumbs. Don't tilt your chair. / Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise while your stir. He remembers as a child silently sitting with her over a bucket of water: I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. / They broke the silence, let fall one by one . . . / Little pleasant splashes . . . / I remembered her head bent towards my head, / Her breath in mine, our fluent dripping knives - / Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

He remembers the cool that came off the sheets just off the line and how he and she would stretch and fold them and end up hand to hand. And then there was Holy Week and The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick. / Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next / To each other up there near the front / Of the packed church, we would follow the text . . / As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul . . . He remembers, too, (after he had become a famous poet) how she pretended bewilderment over his big words and the names he dropped until he learned to govern his tongue in front of her and lapse into the country dialect of his childhood.

Finally he remembers her death; how his father In the last minutes . . .said more to her / Almost than in all their life together. / . . .His head was bent down to her propped-up head. / She could not hear but we were overjoyed. / He called her good and girl. Then she was dead, / The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned / And we all knew one thing by being there. / The space we stood around had been emptied / Into us to keep, it penetrated / Clearances that suddenly stood open. / High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

How similar a scene to my own experience by the bedside of my dying sister not too long ago! A vacancy is left and yet not a mere vacancy but a peculiar vacancy - a vacancy somewhat like that of Christ's empty tomb, a kind of post-partum vacancy suggesting that a birth rather than a death has occurred.

And what more appropriate time for the Church to remind us of that consoling thought than now at the end of October and beginning of November as the days grow dimmer, a chill fills the air and the trees go bare. But before they do, what splendor - such as I saw early each morning last week as I walked down that avenue of oak trees on Arnold Drive - at Eldridge - just as they were catching the rays of the rising sun - the leaves all a transparent red or scarlet or orange or golden yellow - and so high against a pure blue sky that I walked along the avenue as if it were the side aisle of some grand cathedral - which it was of course, one built by God himself. It seemed to say that when we die, whoever we might be, we all go out in a blaze of glory like autumn foliage!

The Church obviously considers this a time to think about death: the death of loved ones and our own eventual demise - but with the mellow expectation that death is but prelude to our rebirth somewhere, somehow - where you and I shall have an opportunity to relate eternally to others (in my case to my sister) with an intimacy adequately expressible on this side of the grave only in such poetry as Seamus Heaney wrote about his mother.

-- Geoff Wood