So of course, we ran away, Dreamer & I & Vinny the dog.
For a whole week.
To escape the diagnosis.
To relish each other and lakeside walks, books and sunsets and daylong fires in a rented cabin.
No phones or WiFi. No laptop.
No clue the heavens would download epic hail . . .
. . . pummeling us, pelting the dog.
Afterward, curled into dry clothes again, I glanced out the window.
Foregrounding the far island,
as if levitating
off Priest Lake, the tail end
of a rainbow’s arc
hovered — curtailed,
yet luminous,
timeless and true as a small ark
of runaway light,
for maybe a minute: Dreamer saw it too.
Heaven bridging earth? Friends, it felt personal. You know what I mean: the future looms, relentless as death. Then one day we glimpse a bright strand or two of God’s handiwork, brief as a tail light’s wink in the dark, already moving beyond our sight.
“Jesus is going ahead of you. Tell others.” So said the angel to women clustered beside the tomb.
Here is a Paschal mystery. How on earth do we endure as well as emulate Christ in our own sorrowful hours . . . for the joy set before us?
Or, as a fellow pilgrim prayerfully put it, after her diagnosis, “Ohhh, I see. This is what we’re doing now: You, Lord, & my love & I.”
The most daunting aspect? Perhaps it was God’s confidence in their whispered assent.
Or so it feels to me sometimes.
There is always a reckoning.
And a beckoning.
In the garden on Easter Mary Magdalene would have clung to the man she cherished — had he allowed it. She thought she’d lost him. Perhaps she had, but only in the ways she had always known him.
“Mary,” he said. “Don’t cling to me. I must ascend to my Father.”
With dementia on our horizon, that could apply to Dreamer and me.
Or possibly you and someone you love.
Dare we taste even a molecule of the cup Jesus drank?
Can we imagine the toxic gradually honeyed? Even effervescent?
Change comes. “Do not cling to the old,” Ronald Rolheiser writes. Instead, “Let it ascend and give you its blessing.”
Here’s part of his poem “Mary Magdala’s Easter Prayer”:
“… if I cling
you cannot ascend and
I will be left clinging to your former self
. . . unable to receive your present spirit.”
For Dreamer and me, home again now, there are moments our runaway minds clamor. It’s tiring. And scary. Even though the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells in us, loves us.
Ah, don’t I sound wise? I can string words together; I can’t make them live.
For now, I am a woman learning to love
the tail end of a rainbow — incomplete
and evanescent, yes — still
trying to stay safe, or is it open . . .
Friends, how might you allow what is changing your life to ascend . . . and give you its blessing?
Friends, how might you allow what is changing your life to ascend . . . and give you its blessing?Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing
Photo by Harry Quan on Unsplash
Packing light? Not my strong suit. Umbrella, snacks, lucky rock—be (over)prepared, that’s my motto. And find someone strong to carry your stuff.