Pilgrim Thoughts
“Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led – make of that what you will.” Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry
It is with a mixture of excitement and anxiety that I look forward to my return to Saskatchewan for my 40th high school reunion Homecoming celebration.
The flood of memories that comes with anticipating a 40 year reunion is rather daunting. What will those girls I was madly in love with in Grade 12 look like now? Will I even be able to hit the green on that 140 yard par 3 where I made my one and only hole in one? How will I match up against those old friends on the “who has best resisted the ravages of time?” measure? Will we have anything to talk about except old times? Will it matter if we don’t? Will some of them even remember me?
This looking back is captured so poignantly by Wendell Berry in his novel Jayber Crow. In the passage Crow looks back on his life after he has returned to the small Kentucky town where he spent a few years of his youth as an orphan in the care of his elderly aunt and uncle. He has just visited the graves of his parents, his aunt and uncle and others who were the links to his past.
As he stood over their graves he thought,
“I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world. I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone…This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost.
I saw that for me this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences and absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.”
It occurs to me that too often I forget about the world that was and the world that is to come. And I fail to pause and find the time to give life to that feeling that I too have been led. We all could benefit from moments of reflection on our lives as ignorant pilgrims.
It is with a mixture of excitement and anxiety that I look forward to my return to Saskatchewan for my 40th high school reunion Homecoming celebration.
The flood of memories that comes with anticipating a 40 year reunion is rather daunting. What will those girls I was madly in love with in Grade 12 look like now? Will I even be able to hit the green on that 140 yard par 3 where I made my one and only hole in one? How will I match up against those old friends on the “who has best resisted the ravages of time?” measure? Will we have anything to talk about except old times? Will it matter if we don’t? Will some of them even remember me?
This looking back is captured so poignantly by Wendell Berry in his novel Jayber Crow. In the passage Crow looks back on his life after he has returned to the small Kentucky town where he spent a few years of his youth as an orphan in the care of his elderly aunt and uncle. He has just visited the graves of his parents, his aunt and uncle and others who were the links to his past.
As he stood over their graves he thought,
“I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world. I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone…This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost.
I saw that for me this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences and absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.”
It occurs to me that too often I forget about the world that was and the world that is to come. And I fail to pause and find the time to give life to that feeling that I too have been led. We all could benefit from moments of reflection on our lives as ignorant pilgrims.
posted by Ben Buan | 9:24 p.m.
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