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Dear Friends-
Every year in the nostalgia of Thanksgiving, I read something from Frederick Buechner. Over my years of ministry, he has been the master of unearthing lovely memories and deep emotions, the stories of our lives, the joys and sorrows we share. Here are some of his wisest words, which I offer as a Thanksgiving gift to you from a book of his called A Room to Remember.
“In one sense the past is dead and gone, but in another sense, it is not done with at all, or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere. A scrap of some song, a book we read as a child, a stretch of road we used to travel, an old photograph. Suddenly there it all is. Old failures, old hurts. Times too beautiful to tell.
We are all such escape artists. We are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except what really matters, except for what is going on inside our own skin. We chatter. We hold each other at bay. It is the
same when we are alone. We turn on television, or find some chore that could easily wait. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear of what lies beneath the surface. We get tired.
But there is a deeper need, to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive to ourselves, to the long journeys of our lives. So much has happened. Remembering means a deeper, slow kind of remembering, a searching and finding. ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ goes the old spiritual – but we know it. We are to remember it. And the happiness we have seen, too – precious times, precious people, moments when we were better than we know how to be.
And then, we will find beyond any feelings of joy or regret, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way, all is well. We have survived. There were times we never thought we would and nearly didn’t. Many times I have chosen the wrong road, or the right road for the wrong reason. Many times I have loved people too much for their good or mine, and others I might have loved I have missed loving and lost. I remember times I might have given up, but I didn’t. Weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far. A love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive. We are never really alone.”
In Gratitude-
George
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