It comes to a moment like this when things must be said, stories must be told, and truths proclaimed. The distance between head and heart cries out to be covered. The psychologists claim that we are in a mad dash to reach closure. The moralists will say that 90 years is a good long life and that death can come as a release. The religious will say that this is the time when timeless truth breaks in and makes this a time of reflection and insight. Now there is truth in all this. We pause at all those places and truths. But are any of them enough, or do any of them really capture the feelings, or cover the distance?
This moment in time is about books and taking delight in them. It is about a look that came across her face when like the widow searching for her mite found a hidden treasure at auction. It is about a look that causes many here to look at life differently and more joyfully. It is not about closure is it? It is about how this life opened something in your life. It is not about closing the distance but opening your mind and heart to the memories. In the opening you know what you cannot manufacture but what you can cherish. It is not just about the eternal but about how the timeless became timely and present in a way that you can name dates and places when life was special and much more then a tick of the clock.
Maybe it happened when the next thing you knew there was the truck coming around the corner with the latest treasure trove and you knew that here was the beginning of an afternoon’s worth of adventure. Or maybe it was the utter joy in a grandmother than gave new definition to the meaning of the term grand, and that will help you stay grounded in a way that will keep your spiritual energy flowing. Maybe it was the assistance you got doing a high school term paper. At the time you might not have thought much about it, but you look back now and you realize that it was one of those oft repeated acts by public employees that actually preserves the public good as it passes on the treasure of knowledge and as you are treasured in the process. It was the kind of work that is really a calling that some folks wind up doing for 29 years for the likable and the somewhat hard to like. Yet then again, the work was not about having a good feeling about everyone who came in the door but trying to give them a feel for how knowledge and wisdom can change your life for the better.
It is about a treasured relationship that resulted in a book dedication: a relationship in which, when you spent time together, time passed differently because for a time you passed over into the timeless. It just happened: nothing that you could make happen but something that you could be open to have happen in your life.
Now these are the things that need to be talked about because they bear repeating because in the repeating we are born up by the treasures that we have discovered along the way and the discovery that along the way that we have been treasured by something that is larger than any of us and all of us. None of this completely covers the distance between the head and heart and it ought not to be covered. Opening some distance here reminds us that relational is not reasonable but opens something in us when we surrender a little bit of our reason to the somewhat irrational passion of old books in antiquarian and antiquated bindings. Yet, we are more alive and give more life because of this victory that comes through this surrendering. I never met Anne Purnell yet as I heard Dennis talk about her I felt that I had known her all my life because all my life I have known people like Anne Purnell: talk about the timeless becoming timely. They are the folks you sort of envy because they have a passion that brings them joy and others blessing. Now that does not provide closure but it does provide an opening to what life is all about and what life can be all about.
If I understand my gospel, and I think that I do, that is the deal we get as human beings. Life simple does not serve up finality when life is all wrapped up in a neat package. But, it does provide an opening. That is what happens Easter morning in the story. There is not finality - only an opening to the future. To trust in that is a bit daunting for to live that way is as William Sloane Coffin puts it “to live with minimum protection and maximum support.” You know why the women left with some fear and trembling. But it is to be much more alive than we would otherwise be. That is what we celebrate today - that because of this life we are much more alive. It does not provide closure, only an opening.
2:32:20 PM 
|
