An Oldie and Then Some

I wrote the following two years ago today, during an October in which I attended four funerals and was thus repeatedly pulled back into my own life. This October it's been Lisa's death in Funky Winkerbean that's done the job.

Two years ago was also the October in which I began my real aquaintance with Ignatian spirituality, which would lead to me to the quote from Karl Rahner, Jesuit and great Catholic theoloian, I am adding tonight. I think it explans what's been going on in Funky Winkerbean.

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But You Don't Know

It must have been an evening just like this, warm and hazy, the sun lingering on the horizon.

Our two families lived on a hillside out in the country, separated by a small woods and a short gravel road, and my grandmother told me that she had come over to our house, for desert I think. I don't know if my grandfather was with her. At any rate, the adults talked for awhile in the kitchen.

"The baby's already down," my mother said. "Would you like to go in and take a peek?"

"Oh, no," said my grandmother. "I don't want to disturb him. I'll see you tomorrow."

If I had only known, she would say later. If I had only known. Meaning, If I had only known that I would never see either one of them again.

And then, when she told that story, she would always say that as she walked home she could hear my mother singing through the kitchen window as she did the dishes.

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[The chalice of the Holy Spirit] is drunk only by those who have slowly learned in little ways to taste the fullness in emptiness, the ascent in the fall, life in death, the finding in renunciation.

(Karl Rahner, S.J.)