This morning I was going to write about a thought that came to me about how I so often have lived my life...flying below the radar. Yesterday I was packing up my office at work because the Novalis team is moving two floors down. I found that Willian James quote that is my mantra..probably a little too long for a real mantra..but I love it at any rate:
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success. and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride."
I have never read the rest of the book (Varieties of Religious Experience) which I have somewhere in the house. Maybe in recovery, I will! But more on why I think I've done that some other time.
Last night, when Patti B phoned saying she dreamt of me and I was in an icon (is that good?..doesn't that mean I'm dead? .made me nervous) and then again that I was a sclupture madly wrestling with an angel. (Well, maybe she dreamt that because I had looked at Lynne's "Jacob Wrestling With an Angel" at the office and mused that maybe it should be my memorial card (yes, let the dark thoughts of death be tamed by practical concerns). At first it alarmed me until I remembered that when Jacob wrestled with the Angel, he didn't die...he survived the fight and would not let the Angel go until it blessed him. (I just remembered that last bit right this minute!). So...maybe good dream, Patti!
And then yesterday too, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, the beautiful priest/poet whose wonderful book we published a few years ago, responded to my news of retirement and cancer with this:
someone said to me, God wouldnot have made me a priest to take me off the planet too soon. I think similarly God wouldn't bring you to the threshold of retirement to play a trick on you.
you have my prayers, dear.
That gave me a real kick ..up! It cheered me.
Buoyed by all this love, prayer and concern, today Fr. Ron and I went to my folks for lunch only to come home to a message from Dr. Kupet's office to inform me that, guess what, we've been able to move up your surgery to Sept 22. Yikes, that's next Thursday!...So calls to Prill and Mom, while dealing with Andy who came to day to fix stuff on the furnace and bleed all the rads (now in good shape for the winter!) and Manuela's visit with custard tarts and a travelogue of Portugal. Another place to go!
And a calm busy evening e-mails and Facebooks messages to my peeps while watching a charming happy little movie .."Secondhand Lions" with Robert Duvall, Michael Caine and that kid from Sixth sense with three names who reminded me a bit of Paolo. And again alway always amazed by the goodness of my world and the embrace of the Communion of Saints.
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