Good morning…
To help the family gather pictures for her funeral reception, I went to my friend’s condo last week. My heart was overjoyed to see an antique painting of fruit hanging on her bedroom wall. This handprinted original was a gift she had opened from me, by-chance, at our recent “Symbols of the Soul Gift Exchange,” a final exchange of wrapped gifts symbolizing something important learned together from the semester. This painting reminded both of us that our essential spirits will eventually be enfolded in an all-inclusive, all-loving reality. Here is a book excerpt giving meaning to the painting.
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Excerpt from Margaret Silf’s The Other Side of Chaos
I remember a time when an aunt of mine was bereaved. She had lost her much-loved husband and was in deep grief. She would not, perhaps, have called herself a person of conventional faith, but one day she asked me, “Margaret, where do you think he is?”
At first I was daunted by the question. The honest answer would have been, “I have no idea.” An easy answer would have been the standard Christian response: “Of course he is with the Lord now, and at peace, and one day you will be reunited.” But did I really believe that, and even if I did, could I have offered the answer to her without sounding glib? I thought for a while and then decided to share something of my own experience with her. I told her about a time in my life – well, really it was more like a moment out of time – when all I can say is that I knew that life is held in a mysterious presence that we cannot name or describe and that this presence is utterly loving and all-welcoming… I told her, in a few words, about my own little glimpse of the reality of things…I believed my uncle’s essential spirit was enfolded in that all-inclusive, all-loving reality…
This same aunt of mine has a little sketch pinned up on her kitchen wall. It’s a sketch of two ripe cherries that she painted herself at a time when my uncle had been critically ill but had recovered. During his illness she had been distraught, and while she was visiting him in the hospital in another town, a stranger in that town befriended her and offered her a room to stay in during my uncle’s illness. She had thankfully accepted this offer, and during her stay with this good soul, her hostess had tried to think of ways to encourage her to trust herself and her own deep resources. She had hit on the idea of inviting her guest to try to paint! At first my aunt had refused. She “knew” she couldn’t paint, and she had other things on her mind. Then one afternoon, when she was sitting brooding about the gloomy future, something prompted her to try. To her own amazement, and to the delight of her insightful new friend, she painted those cherries. Now they hang in her kitchen and remind her every day that when you think your own resources are completely depleted, something wholly new and unexpected reveals itself, and says, “Yes, you can.”
Our conversation about where my uncle was returned to the topic of those painted cherries. My aunt had rediscovered the rock-solid foundation within her. She knew that her lost husband was in the place where those cherries grew… Neither of us could prove it. We didn’t need to. There are some things that you know, with a knowledge that comes not from the head but from the heart. (p. 76-80)
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My heart is at peace this morning, knowing that my friend is where the cherries grow.
Stay with what you heard from the beginning, the original message. Let it sink into your life. If what you heard from the beginning lives deeply in you, you will live deeply in both Son and Father. This is exactly what Christ promised: eternal life, real life! (1 John 2:24-25, MSG).
…Sue…
