Pastoral Thought, September 16, 2001
by Therese Baumberger
Next comes the grief
Next comes the grief,
shock and anger having passed.
Now comes the wondering
how life will ever be again
in the heart-dragging absence
of everything it once was.
Old familiar garments now are rent,
no new threads yet on the loom.
Humans are meaning-makers. From infancy, we seek to make sense of our
world. Making meaning is a deep instinctual drive in us. Right now I
see that drive in terms of making meaning of the small and great tragedies
of our lives. I have spent a great deal of time trying to make meaning
of the terrorist attacks of September 11th.
I thought about the tossings and turnings of life. While driving home
one day, a line from one of my favorite films came to me. The film is
an adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, "Persuasion." One of
the characters says something like, "We don't all of us want to
be in calm waters all our lives." I don't have the luxury of being
in calm waters right now..
I thought about despair. I remembered how much I missed lilac trees
when I first came to California in 1988. We had a whole lane of lilac
trees on the farm where I grew up in South Dakota, and I loved their
scent in the spring. I'd carry huge armfuls in to fill the house with
it. I learned that they don't grow here because they need a heavy frost,
some really cold weather, in order to be able to bloom.
I thought about how hard it is to allow myself to feel anger about
all this. I thought about how some species of trees need forest fires
in order to survive, because their seeds can only germinate if exposed
to intense heat. I've heard that fire causes some pinecones to burst
open and shower their seeds on the earth. And some seeds that meet the
calm steadfast soil, watered wet by rain, will grow into new trees,
forming new forests.
