A LITTLE MARY OLIVER WITH OUR EASTER

 

Common Bluets on a Rocky Hillside

"The Veil"

There are moments when the veil seems 

almost to lift, and we understand what 

the earth is meant to mean to us -- the 

trees in their docility, the hills in

their patience, the flowers and the 

vines in their wild, sweet vitality.  

Then the Word is within us, and the 

Book is put away.

Mary Oliver is a mystic poet, open and attentive to the presence of God in the world.  She calls the earth "God's body."   To wit, "It is not hard to understand / where God's body is. / It is everywhere and everything."  "The Veil" is a poem that helps us find God.  When I am in the woods or Duke Gardens or where the ground is soft with pine needles underfoot or leaf litter, or when I spy those tiny bluets that are waving on their fragile stems amongst the spongy moss right now, I can feel the Word within us.  God becomes accessible in our daily rounds.    

Oliver lives by curiosity and her image of death is breath-taking.  "When death comes / like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, / I want to step through the door full of curiosity . . . ." Using biblical language, in the same poem she writes:

When it's over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

from "When Death Comes"

"I believe everything has a soul," she says.  Not a human soul, I expect she means, but its own soul.  The soul of something alive and precious to its Creator.  When we love the world, we please God and give God glory.  In the world's beauty we see the beauty of God.  If we all treated the earth as our sacred home, how healing that would be.  If we did that, we couldn't bomb our home into rubble or fail to respond to its needs. 

One more:

"In Blackwater Woods"

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.

Well, no words are truer than these.  We love what is mortal, ourselves and our dear ones, with our minds, hearts and souls.  Nothing is more precious than the body of someone we love.  We stay alive not only for our own sakes, but so as not to cause pain to those for whom we are the gift of life itself.  

But Christ also taught us to let go.  He was able to say, "It is finished" and relinquish himself to God.  Our faith helps us do the same.  Because what we have learned every Easter is that we move from our fragile mortality to our eternal immortality.  In the interim, I am grateful for Mary Oliver and her vision. 

Now, for all of life, let us give thanks.  

                                                                        HAPPY EASTER from Nina Naomi