My river of life seems to have “stopped flowing” for awhile these days. But now I begin to come to terms with Sr. M. Franca’s unexpected demise and I try to serenely get used to her other form of “presence” in our midst.During this time of grappling with Mystery, I find comfort in these excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s poem, East Coker, the second of his Four Quartets:
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
you must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
you must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
you must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not. (…)
How grateful I am that we have our faith in Christ to sustain us in this moment! Faith in one who has known our sorrows, our pains, our death. Again, T.S. Eliot:
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
that questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
the sharp compassion of the healer's art
resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
if we obey the dying nurse
whose constant care is not to please
but to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
and that, to be restored,
our sickness must grow worse. (…)
The dripping blood our only drink,
the bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. (…)
Sr. Franca’s death is some kind of “mystery milestone” for me in my religious life. It taught me, it is actually still teaching me another kind of communion: deeper, more intense, of a totally-other dimension. Notwithstanding the reality and the pain of separation, there is, in fact, perfection and beauty in this boundless, frontier-less presence and union. The end of T.S. Eliot’s East Coker expresses it better:
Love is most nearly itself
when here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
here or there does not matter.
We must be still and still moving
into another intensity.
For a further union, a deeper communion
through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
of the petrel and the porpoise.
In my end is my beginning.
