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.

—Mary Oliver from “In Blackwater Woods”

I would love life to be this neat and linear—first you love, then you hold, then you let it go. But living is messy, not neat or linear.

I’ve thought about being able to bargain with God—I certainly know many people who use prayer to get them through what seem to be unfathomable depths. But I have a hard time getting my head around the actor God of my Jewish childhood who had the power to make things happen in response to human behavior.

I prepared for ministry with the Christian God, who at least had a little more time on earth through his son, Jesus. But the God in the Christian testament is even less personable and no more believable to me.  And though the God metaphor is my preferred vocabulary for discussing the sacred, my image of the mystery which connects us to one another and to the larger universe is neither personal nor omnipotent.

This makes it kind of hard to know how to invoke the spirit of connectivity and support that I have longed for as I go through the biggest challenge of my life thus far—watching my soul-mate succumb to cognitive dementia over the last six years. She passed away in July, so the years of observing her suffering are behind me, but my needs for connection to the larger universe remain.

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