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| Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com |
This excerpt is reprinted from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, courtesy of Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock
* * * * *
There are no funerals in
Heaven. As a believer in the sacred History of faith, I accept death. It is the
[often] hard shell we must break through to begin our flight into Life. It is
moving from chrysalis to Chrisom, perhaps. Our ultimate birth.
To Christos. Truth is an upward spiral.
I despair of the despair
that we wear so often as an arm band, the existential angst we endlessly
proclaim, which leaves no room in the soul for resurgence, for resilience, for hope.
And now I see that I also have done this! What a vast, a blind betrayal!
Those who cannot
celebrate life destroy it―destroy others, who in turn destroy.
What they cannot
celebrate, they desecrate.
And living must be, the
soul insists, a celebration. To exult is to exalt. To proclaim the tender truth and rollicking
affirmation of faith is to live beyond mere enduring. It unleashes the
neurons that fire the thoughts that fuel the muscles that raise us up from
indolence.
Such is the House that
God built. Existential pleasure must
bring a recognition, a small ecstasy of awareness―I am alive, alive, ohhh!
And I am not a cockle, not a mussel. Living is surely meant to be an endless
orbit of meaning-full, an upward cycle that siphons finally into that
slender Passage which is not, oh no, a dark hole.
Entropy is a ravage only
of the temporal and temporary and intemperate.
And so, today, I
lay down this weight of timeless grief against the splendor of this day,
against the altar of these rocks, this gravel I stand upon, with the incense
of this morning still awaft like a certain holiness within my breathing.
I celebrate being.
Despite the daily horrors, despite the anguish surging, despite the fire of
grief that still looms, ever creeping, like the ghastly glow of holocaust
beyond us. I celebrate because I must; because we must, because God hears and
surely answers . . . or this maelstrom will consume us; it
will be a prophecy fulfilled.
I celebrate what it is to
be truly human, what it means to share the earth together, what it has been to
us as home away from Home, what it must become within us and among us, and
beyond us, for our children. What we must become, within us and among us and
beyond us.
Celebrants. I celebrate
the very fact of life, of seeing these shaggy carpets of green-and-ochre and
the wild-painted skies that cover me, of hearing the chirrup and buzz and
flutter of small life, of knowing earth-born labor and labors borne of the
heart.
I celebrate the being of
you who cross my path this day in thought or step, who share this swath of
earth or one dissimilar, who grieve for its poverty and share its richness with
me. Who enrich my poverty.
I thank God for my life,
for giving breath to my halting aspirations. For your life and finest
hopes. For His breath upon you, within you.
I thank you, oh God, who
redeems me from myself in this small celebration! Who calls me to Rest. Who
gives me today geraniums, and a new, eager flow of thought. For doughty ferns
in pots, and doughty friends who force my rusty gates; for violet sage and
stippled rocks to catch my eye, to catch my breath, my soul.
I praise the God who
sprawls His name, and the signature of His Son, His Chronica Christos,
across the bursting universe and weaves it deep within the spiral of our genes.
Who walks the waves
still, always . . . stilling them, forever stilling them.
Truly the gates of hell
shall not prevail.
