HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 6/25/18
June 25, 2018
Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)
I was in a garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes I was alone, sitting on a stone bench between two long hedges of roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I felt the most powerful feeling of peace, and I had the thought that death, if it means an absorption into a reality like the one that was before me, might be all right.
– Irving Howe
What are the sources of epiphanies like this moment described by the eminent literary critic Irving Howe?
The sociologist Peter Berger suggests that gods are not, as some claim, human projections of our wishful thinking, but that humanity and its works – angels, skyscrapers, symphonies – are God’s projections into the world. He speaks of an “otherness that lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.”
We read these statements and conjectures, and our hearts rise. As we wend our way through the shadows and high moments in the wake of loss, these statements and intuitions are as food to the starving, as water to those all but overcome with thirst.
I will watch for my own moments in the garden.