“We fix our hopes in mystery . . .”
That was one of the lines spoken at last night’s performance of The Christmas Revels, which I was attending. It was a dramatization, in medieval format, of songs and customs relating to the ancient mysteries of winter and summer, of dark and light, of birth and death, of good and evil. I have wrestled with many such dualities this year, and have come to the same conclusion. Life is a mystery, a wondrous journey indeed, and all things are woven together. Sunlight creates shadows, and the night is full of stars. How is it possible to separate them, to experience one without the other?
That is what my year has been like. I was in the hospital in March and April, in very severe pain with toxic colitis. I missed about a month of work (with no compensation), filled out endless paperwork for Medical Assistance and Food Stamps, despaired at having to be on Prednisone, a powerful steroid that controls inflammation but has dozens of very undesirable side effects, was able to start seeing a counselor who specializes in chronic illness, and then was denied that help a month later when I was switched mandatorily to MinnesotaCare. And I could go on. Yet when friends would write or call to express sympathy for my “terrible ordeal”, like in the story of the Chinese farmer and his lost horse, my mind would say, “But maybe this is a blessing…”
The farmer only had one horse, and when his neighbors came to console him for its loss he said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?” Some months later his horse returned bringing a splendid wild stallion. That seemed to be good fortune until one day the son fell from the stallion and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father again said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?” And a year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame he was spared. And as the moral goes, “The changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.”
In June, I happened to read a wonderful book called “Ambiguous Loss,” which quoted an Anishinabe morning prayer. I have used it almost every day.
“I step into the day, I step into myself, I step into the mystery.”
It gives me courage to be here always in the present moment.
In July and August the mystery came full circle. I was in Wales traveling and giving concerts with the choir from the Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Bloomington. This is not my “home” church – I got involved with them because they wanted someone to teach them some Welsh in preparation for the trip, and it seemed a good opportunity for me to get to Wales a second time. When the hospitalization wiped out all my savings for the trip, these wonderful people, many of them still strangers to me, made sure that I would not be left behind. Friends in the St. David’s Society of Minnesota also took up a collection. To experience that kind of love and support is a once in a lifetime kind of thing. And every time I think of it I am filled with joy and gratitude. I cannot explain to you the mystery of why Wales is the land of my heart. I only know that it is somehow “home.” And there I was, singing a solo in Welsh, and I am told that it brought tears to at least one little old lady in a wheelchair in St. Mary’s church in Beddgelert. Other highlights included singing inside Caernarfon Castle near the dais where Prince Charles had his investiture, at Eaton Hall, the private residence of the Duke of Winchester, and around St. Winefride’s well at Holywell. Everywhere we went the warmth and the hospitality was fantastic. I was even interviewed for the Chester Chronicle, and no one was more astonished than I was to see the nearly full-page article titled “Laurel’s Class Act in the US.” I thrilled to be in places with ancestral connections : Chester Cathedral, Erddig House and Elihu Yale’s tomb in Wrexham, the ruins of Castell Dinas Bran on top of a high hill overlooking Llangollen, and of course being in Owen Glendower country.
Well, I could go on and on, and not just about Wales. It has been a year of healing, of revelatory dreams, of seeing angels, and experiencing the most amazing synchronicities. I still don’t know where I’m going, or what my purpose is, or what tomorrow will bring. I fix my hopes in the mystery.
“No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven!
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see – and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look!
Welcome it, grasp it, touch the angel’s hand that brings it to you…Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty – beneath its covering – that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.
Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.
And so, at this time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.” (Fra Giovanni, written to a friend on Christmas Eve, 1513)
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