Friday, April 2, 2010

ancient and obdurate oaks

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This week has found me sick. Shamefully: I am not very pain tolerant, at all. When I am sick, I find it difficult to pray, difficult to be kind, difficult to be diligent. And in all honesty, it has just been a measly little cold. Just a snuffy nose, a headache, and a cough.
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Last summer I came across this quote from Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill and found her description of sickness, if not her conclusion about literature, so decisively true:
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"Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his 'Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth' with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us--when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."
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Sickness seems to be the appointed school of sanctification for me.
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In other thoughts:
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+ A headline today: "One of the Moscow subway bombers was a 17 year old widow." My age.
+ I think the Maundy Thursday service and liturgy just might be my favorite of all (so far).
+ My mantra this week: "Communion fills the empty spaces, not consumption."
+ I can endure one more month.
+ ". . . you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life."
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Forsaken, that we might not be forsaken.
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in somber silence,
Jessina
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