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Like Stars in Sunlight
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
* * *
* * *
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field…”
“Verily, with every difficulty, there is relief…”
“What we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises…”
In the I Ching, the Confucian Book of Changes whose core wisdom may date back to before the time of Abraham, there appears this remarkably simple and true statement:
The wind blows over the lake, and stirs the surface of the water.
Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.
The quality the truest things have sometimes of being hidden in plain sight is one of the thumbprints of the mystical on our ordinary days. And I wonder if maybe you’ve seen that thumbprint as you’ve strolled (or paddled, or squidshed) around campus this weekend. I wonder if you’ve had that sense, while you were looking again at buildings you didn’t fully see when you lived an everyday life among them, that the meanings of this place in your life were hidden in plain sight when you were here. Or maybe, when you rounded a corner and suddenly encountered a memory so vivid that you feel as though you’ve physically run into something, that sense that, over time, the far-sightedness with which you come to see this place makes visible some of the truest things about it that were hidden before.
And if you’re one who has known this place for a number of seasons in your life beyond that early season of your living here, then maybe you know something about it that the fresh crop of tearful, exuberant seniors hadn’t yet learned as they graduated and packed up and said their goodbyes a week ago. Maybe you’ve noticed that when this place is gone from you, or you from it, is the time when this place is the fullest for you, or when you are the fullest of this place. Emily Dickinson sat down and wrote a note to one of her most beloved friends just a few minutes after he’d departed from one of their frequent visits, in which she said, “I went to the room as soon as you left – to confirm your presence.” Perhaps you have noticed that sometimes when your empty arms are flung wide open, your heart is fullest to overflowing.
Of course, there is no way to diminish the aching emptiness of the loss of people we treasure. And this weekend is peopled by those aches for some of you, who are remembering so many tiny details (the little thing he always said, the look you’d all exchange just before a peal of laughter…) and so aware of the empty space once filled by someone you treasure. The poet says,
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
We do bear the names of the things we want; as the scripture of my tradition has it, where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also. The treasure hidden in the field gives the field its meaning. The memories hidden in plain sight in the place where you once grew up are like pearls of great price, and looking for them gives meaning and beauty to the place and the journey to it and the journey back home again. The realm of heaven is like a whole company of us turning up at the confluence of rivers looking for pearls of great price – and knowing as we look that what we treasure teaches us about the state of our hearts, our consciences – and recognizing that the aching of our arms is a sign of how we are named by what we yearn for.
So – I went to the room as soon as you had left – to confirm your presence. I went to that place we lived, when we’d long since moved on – to confirm how alive we are. I went to stand below the window of that room that was my home, and saw myself looking out. I went to the dream of what I wanted my life to be, what I wanted this country to be, this world to be – and saw how my wanting named me, saw how my yearning for what might be shapes who I am and what I do. I went to see again the meanings written in plain sight on whole swaths of the time of my life, and read in them how the aching of my heart shapes the direction of my loving – and saw, with my far-sighted eyes, how much it matters what I love.
“We don't
remember the dream,” says the poet;
but the
dream remembers us.
It is there all day…
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
Maybe we don’t remember what we love every moment of every day. But maybe what we love is the yeast hidden in the measured quantities of days, that makes the days rise. Maybe what we love comes to steer us, minute by minute, if we are willing to live according to love – instead of living according to fear, or anger, or possession. Maybe what we love becomes like some part of the meaning of certain times, hidden in plain sight, stirring the surface of our days without being visible itself.
And maybe, most of all, gratitude is like that.
When I was in college, for a few years I studied voice with a six-foot three-inch tall octogenarian with exuberant shocks of white hair and fire in his eyes, who spoke with the faintest reminiscence of a North Carolinian lilt, and carried every inch of his frame as though it were a sacred trust. He was prone to interrupt my arpeggios with a wave of the hand and an aphorism of one kind or another. Most of the things about my singing proved to be beyond his help. But, years later, it dawned on me as I learned the news of his death and as I remembered, that it hadn’t really been singing he’d been teaching me at all. One day, when the wave of his hand spared both him and Schubert of the further agony of my attempts, he said, “My dear boy, gratitude is the highest emotion of which we human beings are capable. It is what distinguishes us from lower forms. Now sing.”
Maybe it is gratitude we hear between the moments of time, whispering in every language of the Spirit that the ears of our ears have ever learned to understand. Maybe gratitude is the star that steers us, the want that names us, the dream that remembers us. Maybe gratitude is like stars in sunlight, shining away, written truly but invisibly on the heavens like the true meaning of our lives: not always legible with the naked eye, but shedding the light of amazing grace nonetheless, verily offering relief in every difficulty. Maybe even now if we lift our sights to read the meaning that is written in plain sight on all the edifices of memory and if we open our arms to feel the ache of what we have lost and what we have found, maybe we’ll see the stars of gratitude shining in the broadest daylight. And maybe the stars will guide us home.
The Rev. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain,