June
24, 2019
Greetings from
the fleeting glimpse,
I sat fidgeting in the seat, my suit clinging to my skin, overdressed
for the temperature, maybe for anything, even a funeral. I waited for people to settle in around me,
waited to see if there was anyone I knew.
Exchanged polite nods with strangers, those looks you give people in
elevators when nothing else comes to mind.
The woman leading the service stepped to the front and adjusted the
small light on the podium, settled a few pages of notes. When she looked up, we all thought she was
looking directly at us, and fought our collective fidgeting. There was a pause,
and then she spoke in a clear, measured voice.
“We are
gathered here today, to acknowledge the passing of an important part of our
lives. It is not a time of simple
mourning, any of us here know that in the sadness there is also a feeling of
celebration and hope. In all of that, we
are here to fully sense what has left us.
To give it the gravity and depth of us it deserves.”
I leaned back
to listen, felt my spine against the hard, wooden bench. I watched her settle her posture, now
speaking with power, now telling us from her soul. And even while watching her, out of the corner
of my eye I was aware the window was open.
I did not turn to look.
She said: “And
so it is that we assemble here, all of us in our beauty, all of us with the
same burden and glory, and mourn the passing of The Moment. It is hard to accept the loss. It was with us, and then, without warning,
without any chance for patience or prayer or a thought of when there would be
another, it was gone.”
Some of the
people around me looked down at their hands, and I felt the grief in the
room. We all knew.
“The Moment was
with us, it was a rich and vibrant part of us.
It brought us great pleasure, laughter, took us to the breathless
heights of our greatest experience. And
too, The Moment marked pain. The Moment was
different for each of us. It lasted a
second, or a few minutes, or for lucky few, something longer that is harder to
measure.”
I listened to
her words, felt them really, and still my eyes were drawn to the wall lined
with stained glass depictions of holy people held in place by the marble and
brick. My eyes followed the colors until
I could see through the open window.
Blue sky. I breathed in and out.
“The Moment when we felt lighter than air, when we felt we could sing flawlessly,
we could run without ever tiring, when the words we searched for flowed from us,
when we laughed so hard we could not breathe and did not care.” She smiled at us and leaned forward over the
podium, looking right at us. “The Moment we loved someone, when we held our baby
for the first time, The Moment we had an answered prayer. The first hot day of summer when we tasted
the water from the hose and gave it the attention that such pleasures deserve,
and we knew we were in The Moment. We
lived ourselves into it. We felt our
existence and were grateful, even when it was difficult.”
The rows of people around me smiled and fidgeted, and we all felt The
Moment ripple through us as we each remembered our own. I looked down at my hands, interlaced the
fingers, and looked up into the eyes of a small boy in the pew in front of
me. He was whispering something to his
mother, she was shushing him. He looked
back over the worn wooded frame and mouthed the words “I have to go potty!” Somehow, I didn’t burst out laughing. I looked up at the speaker, again stifling the
mirth.
“But we can be honest, after all this is a place of truth. Too often The Moment came, and we could not
bring ourselves to go with it. We were
afraid, or we thought we knew better, that we should put aside the things of a
child, or we felt our attention was better focused elsewhere, and The Moment is
not forgiving. The Moment is generous
but impatient and is gone before we even consider asking for a second chance.”
“The Moment
would sometimes bring sadness, or fear, or something darker. Letting go of the hand of a loved one, the
last time, feeling the flame flicker and gutter and then dim. We watched our daughter walk into school
without us, that first time, and knew she was now on her own path.
There was The
Moment when you were eleven and you stood in front of the boy you loved and
opened your mouth to say it and then did not.
And so we grieve the wasted Moment, the resentful Moment, the Moment not
taken.”
I was sitting
close enough that I knew she could see me looking out the window, the experience
rife with irony, but there was something that caught my eye, a whirl of birds
surging from a tree out there. They disappeared
from the frame of the stained glass. I
waited as the speaker poured her message onto us.
“For many of us, knowing The Moment was far
too brief. Yes, there were times when The
Moment seemed infinite, an experience we thought would never end. We gather here, my friends, in this morning
of tragedy and celebration and joy, and raise our eyes to The Moment, now lost
to our lives, which has brought us closer to living than almost anything we can
name. We take this time to commemorate the
loss, to feel the Moments of pain and ache and beauty and passion. We are together to feel the hope of being
rejoined with The Moment again someday.”
People dabbed
at their eyes, someone sniffled behind me.
I watched through the window, the blue sky there, a smudge of moon, the
tips of the tree. I knew the service was
nearly over, even without hearing each word I could tell by the pace of the
speaker’s language that she said what was in her to share.
I almost
turned back to the front of the church when I saw three birds come back to the branches
of the tree, first fluttering around each other, flitting among the limbs to
find their place. And then one by one
settling into where they wanted to belong.
I could see their shape against the blue, knew each feather, saw the
tiniest shade of color in each shadow on them, and felt myself go with
them. And still heard the words;
“The Moments
will come to us, and each time we are ready we will glimpse our purpose in
being here. We will embrace The Moments
and be embraced by them. The day will come
when all our days are our present, and each Moment will be filled with an eternity
of Moments.”
I heard her
say this and it seemed as though the birds were telling me the words. I felt the people around me, their warmth and
grief and hope and love, the essence of them.
The summer reached into the room and lifted me with it, on the wings of
three birds, and I was weightless and timeless. I felt The Moment as if it was
experiencing me. Somewhere in that endless
breath, God smiled.
Hope
this finds you present,
David
Copyright
© 2019 David Smith
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