Someone asked me the other day if I had learned anything during my time in Victoria, if I had gained any insights into life. And then he waited. In silence. One of the things I love best about this man is his gift for silence. If I had asked that question of someone, and then faced several moments of dead air, I would have been hard pressed not to answer my own query – not to fill the void with my own voice. But not Tony. He just waited.

After a moment or two, I said, “Yes, I think I have learned something.”
“What? What is it?” he pressed.

I’ve learned that life is both richer and sadder than it was before.

Richer because I’ve been challenged to enter into the heart and depth of things that I only danced around before. I’ve gained a sense of wholeness, a measure of peace in the midst of this particular happening in my life. I’ve been loved by others as deeply and as completely as it is possible for human beings to love. I’ve relinquished my yen for control and my desire to captain my own ship. I’ve let myself fall into the arms of others, and trusted myself to them in ways I never knew I could. And that vulnerability has been incredibly powerful and beautiful. To allow another to love me and care for me is very frightening, especially for someone as intensely private and obsessively independent as I am. But it is so freeing. So healing. I guess surrendering to God’s will in life, also means surrendering to His will in death. Death of self.

Odd, really, that it is in moments of intense physical and emotional suffering that I have found healing; been transformed through pain and dependence: utter dependence on others, and utter dependence on God. Another paradox. It reminds me of John Donne’s poem “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God”

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine and seek to mende;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force to breake, blow, burn and make mee new.
I, like a usurpt towne, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearely I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Not ever chaste, except you ravish mee.

Unless I am enthralled by God, imprisoned by Him, utterly dependent on Him, I never shall be free.

So, in the midst of all this, life IS richer because I can see into its center more clearly than I could before. I know better what it is that makes life sweet and delightful and worth the pain.

But, life is also sadder. I told Tony that I felt my innocence was gone. The illusion of health and youth has been stripped away. It always has been an illusion, but I was fooled; I didn’t see the man behind the curtain until I got sick. And so now, when I do think of the future, it is always tinged with melancholy. Family celebrations, birthdays, plans for holidays and trips always have festoons of shadows drifting around the edges. A deep awareness of the fleeting nature of life is with me like it never has been before. It is not opressive, but it is always there, and that saddens me. More questions, and fewer answers. But I can live with that.