Good words for today

The following is from James E. Dittes' Driven By Hope: Men and Meaning. I'm putting it here as both an anchor and a reminder to myself:

Men make promises and know keenly the anguish of finding them unkept. We are reminded relentlessly of our failures to others. But men also believe promises and know the keener anguish of finding them unkept, notably the promise that we can live our own life fully and freely. It is a powerful engine, the sorrow of living with that promise unmet.

The Bible tells it clearly, from the beginning: paradise wanting. Adam looked around Eden and asked, Is that all there is? The sorrow of incompleteness is man's from the outset part of creation, not a symptom of sin or fall; just as the sorrow of a blameless life cut short on a cross reveals redemption, not sin. This sorrow of incompleteness, life chronically destined, is what is offered to man as the avenue to wholeness and holiness. Life in want; life detoured, in a closet, a gift not yet unwrapped - this must be the most relentless theme of the Bible, recounted in its many rich variations: faithful affirmation of what lies in store, an affirmation so vivid it measures excruciatingly the deficit at hand.

The Bible shouts (and whispers) the triumphant story of men's wanting: Life is abundant and authentic, but not yet.

. . .

What does a man want? Sigmund Freud never directed to men that famous vexed and impatient question, "What do women want?" He seems to have thought, like most of us, that a real man doesn't "want" or that a real man, if he does find himself in want, doesn't yield to it, but renounces and conquers any "wanting." But he was wrong. So we all are when we bravely pretend otherwise, that we don't want for anything and that to be in want doesn't hurt painfully. Men do live in want, and what we want is not so mysterious or so unseemly. A man, like anyone else, wants to live his own life and to live it fully: life authentic and abundant. Every man's chronic sorrow is for his unlived life. Conquering that sorrow comes to claim every man's prime energies. But it will not be quelled, and the stratagems to defy it or deny it only lead to further distortions, the more notable distortions, the ones that most invite rebuke and regret.

. . .

Sorrow is like grief but more lasting. A man doesn't outlive sorrow the way he can outlive grief. He must simply live out the sorrow. Grief looks backward and can be outlived by looking forward. Grief is the soul wrenched by loss of what once was. It can gradually be let go. Grief abates; sorrow persists. Sorrow looks ahead and mourns what appears missing as far as one can see, the divergence between life visible and life intended. Sorrow is the soul teased. Is that all there is?

. . .

Living in want is not an injury to be fixed, an accident to be recovered from, an ill-fitting garment to be shed. It is not acquired, not optional, not the product of an individual life history. It is decidely not a flaw to be atoned for. Living in want is constituent of what it means to be a man, a product of man's spiritual genes. Men are supposed to live in want, in deep spiritual hunger, in the shadows of their own destiny, desperately hopeful. It is a part of manhood to be welcomed, embraced, lived by, not against. A man is more of a man, not less, for living in want. Sorrow and shadows belong to the order of creation, not to the Fall. And they belong, too, to the process of re-deeming, where we encounter the paradoxical power of finding one's own life by losing it, the power that sorrow and shadows deliver.

Deepest in the belly is not fire but ache.

God Bless the Poets

This one's another keeper (that speaks of both bones and trees in the same breath):

In Blackwater Woods, by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.