"The journey towards wholeness, never complete, uncovering, reclaiming, gathering, integrating, discovering what is lost, losing what is found, a journey of light and darkness." Sister Stanislaus Kennedy.
If you have read these letters for a while you'll know why I like to read Sister Stan, an Irish nun and poverty activist. I first discovered her books in the Shannon Airport about twenty years ago. I had gone to west coast of Ireland for a visit and spend a single unforgettable day on the Aran Island of Inisheer. On the way back home I read her book and have carried that little book of Psalms with her poems ever since.
Her bits of prose remind me of what it is to be human. That we grow, learn and unlearn, and that sometimes we lose what was found. In my own everyday thinking I would believe that once we know something, once we have understood something that we would go on knowing it forever. But I don't. I know I don't because I often make the same mistakes twice. I often forget what I know.
And also because I grow and change, sometimes what was true for me once is no longer so. To remember this I need wisdom, and I often seek it outside myself. It is so I will be reminded, for I need reminding as I go through life. I so easily settle into what has become comfortable and usual for me that I forget to appreciate the significance of ordinary things. I take feeling well for granted. My sight, my hearing, my ability to walk, to think, to hook, to write, are not seen as the miracles that they really are. For they are. So many working parts in each of us that come together for us to be fully ourselves. Little tiny miracles every day.
Then one day you wake up with a jig in your step, or a watery eye, or a sudden cold and you remember how you felt yesterday when everything was perfect. And you remember that you did not fully appreciate yesterday for what it actually held. That there was no way you could always be perfectly appreciative because you are only human after all. And then you know. You know your own frailty. And you are taken aback by it.
And this does not happen once in a lifetime but again and again, because sometimes we know and sometimes we lose what was known. And so we move on, make the best of it. Make do with our little ailment or worry and we keep going. It shakes us up a bit. And for awhile again we know and we are humble, and we go about the day waiting for the chance to forget again, to take it all for granted yet again.
