Every Memorial Day, my father (there he is, in the photo, holding out his arm to steady the flag) joins other veterans at a local Honor Garden to honor those fallen in military service to our country ... that is,
almost
every Memorial Day. This year, like so many things, will be different, and the honoring (and the picnic that traditionally followed) will happen virtually, privately.
It has put in me in a frame of mind to think about memories of time gone by: how do those fragments of being, located somewhere in my brain, help me to navigate my reality now—how do memories help to create who I am, allowing me to move forward, day to day, one "now" at a time? How do my memories, in the act of their retrieval,
re-member
me? I have a feeling it all has to do with the relationships I honor and treasure, and with those I continue to forge...I am somehow a subset of the various "we"s that sustain me...and yet, I am more than those groupings as well.
I hope you'll gather to experience the Memorial Day weekend service we are busy preparing, and I look forward to seeing many of you—you who form me, in part—this Sunday morning. I offer a poem by Richard Wehrman, who is, in his own words, many things—an award-winning illustrator, writer, book designer, painter, graphic designer, student of Zen Buddhism and the School of Spiritual Psychology, jewelry designer, and poet. He, like each of us, is many—part of a "we"— just as the memories that birth him into his own future, like all of ours, are many: across thresholds of now, then, and when...
We Are Living Now
Richard Wehrman
We are living now
our regrets and our failures,
the ache of what we
wish could be again,
now while we have it.
We are living now
with the ghosts of those
we love, in their corporality,
while they have bodies
of flesh, their desires ahead
rather than behind.
We are living now with
the opportunities to change,
to make amends, to
kiss the preciousness
which life has placed here
in our hands.
We are living now
with what we still may
become, with what we are
as we hold our hands
before us in the sunlight.
We are living now
with all we have lost,
that will never come again,
that our tears wash
in the desire to hold one
more time, now, while
in this moment they are ours.
What preciousnesses has life placed in your hands?
What is
becoming
as you hold your hands
open to the sunlight?
How can you honor the "then" in the now, all in the service of the "when" which is always emerging, moment by precious moment?
Making memories together,
Rev. Craig :)
