Dear Friends,
Thursday night on my way home from Northwest about 6:30 pm, I was involved in a three-car accident. While the impact of my car being slammed from behind by two other cars was a bit unnerving, thankfully no one was injured. As I examined my car’s smashed-in rear end and waited for the police officer to write his report, it occurred to me that my tentative plans to drive up to the mountains for the weekend would definitely need to wait. “If this is the worst thing that happens, then I’m pretty lucky,” I thought to myself.
On Friday morning, as I was heading out (in Gail’s car) to run an errand, someone called me on my cell phone. The area code was 401 – Rhode Island. When I arrived at my destination a few minutes later, I checked my voice mail. The caller, it turns out, was a woman who was referred to me by another minister. Her 47-year-old brother, who lived in Atlanta, had just died unexpectedly two days before, leaving four children, ages 17 to 8. The family, all of whom lived out of town, was planning a memorial service for this Sunday at another Atlanta-area UU congregation, but the minister was unavailable. Could I do the service?
Of course, I said yes. So, in two days, I began to learn the bits and pieces about a man whose life had touched so many persons. He wasn’t perfect, said his sister, but he had a unique way of putting others at ease. He was funny, gregarious, and big-hearted, said his brother. He loved us and we knew it, said one of his children.
It seems that imperfections are all around us . . . and that they can be amusing, annoying, and even horribly tragic. Yet, perhaps we can also hope that imperfections can yield opportunities for beauty, wisdom, and healing. The poet Mary Oliver compared life’s imperfections to the beautiful, yet imperfect lily blossoms that grow in the pond:
But what in this world is perfect?
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
I want to believe that I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing –
that the light is everything –
that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom
rising and fading.
And I do.
May we hold our imperfect lives like flowers whose blossoms are sometimes wilted, sometime misshapen and sometimes a little faded. But, oh, how lovely they are still, bunched together, in the fist of our hand.
Yours,
Terry