Poetry

Once upon a time I was falling in love
Now I’m only falling apart.
There’s nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart.

– Jim Steinman

On April 8, a total solar eclipse made a diagonal cut across parts of Central and North America, with parts of 15 U.S. states within the path of totality. Here in St. Louis, we didn’t get this totality, but were in something like the ninety-ninth percentage and got enough of it to know something strange was happening. Dogs barked and crickets chirped.

Sue and I thought about driving a few hours south to be in that totality but we soon learned we’d be joining thousands and thousands of others flocking to southern Illinois to get a glimpse of this natural phenomenon through those ubiquitous cardboard dark-colored glasses. We took a pass on the expected crowds and the traffic jams and opted instead for finding a quiet place in our own front yard. There, we sat for a few hours and read while we waited for the near-darkness to come. It was time well spent. 

The day came and went and we were little changed by it, unlike the ancients who, so were are told, were so freaked out that they thought the world was surely ending. And who could blame them? 

But I’m thinking this morning that this eclipse, perhaps, is also a chance for spiritual reflection, an opportunity for us to ask if anything has gotten in between us and God. To paraphrase Jim Steinman’s song, made famous by the Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler in her 1983 single: Are we still falling in love with God or are we falling apart?

There’s a famous poem-prayer about the practicality of this “falling in love,” which is often attributed to Pedro Arrupe, SJ (1907-1991), but was actually written, we know now, by Joseph Whelan, SJ. It goes like this:

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

For those who believe, that falling in love makes all the sense in the world. But we also know that it can be easy enough to fall out of it if we’re not careful and paying attention. So get out there today and experience the beauty and mystery of the world. And while you’re waiting, offer up a prayer and reflect a bit about what might be getting in the way of your love for God. What else is seizing your imagination? What’s eating up your time and energy? What’s breaking your heart and getting you up and out of bed these days?

On April 8, as the moon moved in between us and the sun once again, so many paused in amazement and wonder. Today, let’s be amazed by the God who waits patiently for us to return. Let’s accept that invitation to fall in love once again. After all, nothing is more practical than that.

As spring comes to America’s Midwest, I am reminded of this reflection I wrote a couple of years ago for a group of spiritual directors. The conversations in it bounce back and forth between what I imagine the risen Christ might say to me and the common struggles of faith that spiritual directors often hear from those who share their stories with us (and also feel ourselves from time to time, of course). The title, “Let Me Easter in You,” was inspired by a poem by Gerard Hanley Hopkins. 

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, handing me a piece of fish and a small helping of bread warm from the morning fire. We sit on the shore together and then he rises and looks out over the lake at his fishermen-disciples, earnestly but haplessly making their way and their living in the early morning light. He shakes his head and grins. “The fish are right there on the other side of the boat, and they can’t see them,” he says.   

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she says to me, her head in her hands and her tears spilling out through her fingers like spring water through reeds. “I am hungry for something I cannot even name. I am searching for something in all the wrong places that for all my life I have been taught and assured should be easy to find. But it’s not. It never is.” 

“Let’s Easter together,” I manage to say, handing her a tissue and giving her my attention. 

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, breaking open the bread with the two men he met on the Emmaus road and inviting me to join in the sharing. The bread is warm in my hand, and he is as close to me as that heat. He turns away from the two men and toward me. He smiles and shakes his head as he speaks: “I walked with them for miles, and they didn’t know it was me.” 

“I don’t know what it all is supposed to mean for me,” he says, “all the words and stories and rituals and prayers. I’m told it’s supposed to set my heart on fire but all I sense is a cold void. Isn’t there more? Shouldn’t there be more?” 

“Let’s Easter together,” I whisper, inviting him to speak his own story.

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, folding the garments and placing them at the place where he had been lain. We walk together into the sun-lit morning and out into the field, and I notice his hand reaching out to touch a slender stem of wheat, cradling its spike in a kind of blessing of the food it will become. “She thought I was the gardener,” he says. “She just couldn’t see me.”

“I don’t know that I believe anymore,” she says. “What sense is there to an empty tomb, a folded cloth, broken bread and a risen man? Why should it matter? When has it ever — even once — changed my life?” 

“Let’s Easter together,” I say. “Let’s see what we hear in the silence and dark of deepest and richest soil. Let’s allow ourselves to remain buried long enough for the light of the sun to warm us into life again. Let’s take our time but reach ever-upward. Let’s gently burst from the deadness of our seeds, sprouting and digging our way back to the surface, a little curl of green barely visible but ever hopeful.

“Then a stem…a few leaves…a flourish of grain, something to be plucked and ground by stone, mixed and patted and baked and served as nourishment for another. Let’s Easter together, grasping a new chance at life when it is offered.”