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Written and dedicated to the memory of my father
Today, the world is so focused on traumatic news that terror has become the new normal. Our sense of dignity and divinity is only a dim memory. How do we deal with all that is happening and not lose our humanity?
As we respond to the rising tide of corruption and destruction that threaten our world everywhere on the planet, we must do that while still carrying within our hearts a lamp lit by beauty, left by heaven within us as a kind of fighter fuel.
Our goals are to light the world, not be darkened by it. It seems to me the way to that is to hold on dearly to the beauty in our lives and not be overcome by the wickedness that stalks our world, shattering our souls and sanity with fear. All of us are blessed by a beauty we did not create but found ourselves born into. If we look for it, we will find it. It may be found in the sound of a loon calling on a damp, early spring morning on a Minnesota lake, or the innocent laughter of a child in the playground or of a couple strolling hand-in-hand along Lake Erie at sunset. For me, it is all of these and one even more endearing, drawn from the deep well of childhood itself.
Wherever beauty is sleeping in your memory, it is whispering to you, beckoning you back to the beautiful, holy, human being you truly are. Where beauty is, peace, kindness, and goodness live alongside it deep within your heart. We have to remember it. We have to reach for it and free it to fly out into the world spreading its wings, courageously as it soars far into the dim light of our darkening skies.
If we forget, the light will go out and if the last person forgets, then the light will go out forever.
On one particular morning a few years ago, I remembered a place of such beauty. On that morning, as I stood in line at the bank, the cable news network showed a raging fire engulfing the steeple of a beautiful old church in Baltimore as a crawler under the scene reported that rats were over-running a province in China and that’s all before the news of the war in Iraq came on. I turned away.
My heart was lingering in another place, another time, lost forever to this time and place and yet vibrantly stirring deep inside my memory. It was a place of such inexpressible beauty, it would always be the nearest physical example of heaven in this life.
Maybe there were faeries, or angels, among those tall languid lilies and colorful Irises in the fragrant flower beds stretching throughout my grandmother’s garden. The entire place remained frozen in time, stilled by an invisible presence. An entire family with all its activities of living and working, growing up and moving away and even dying had all happened before leaving it for another generation to live in wonder about all who had lived there.
There was always a kind of mystery about the place. It reverberated with voices and laughter whispering in the silence. It was clearly like coming into a room after the party was over. To know that family, one could wander in and among the beautifully manicured gardens, a number of horse barns, an old tennis court and a swimming pool, dusty paths that must have borne them barefooted at play. My grandparents had died long before I was born, but the estate was there and perhaps the same old gardener whom my grandmother had instructed still tended her magnificent gardens.
Only silence remained where there had once been so much life. Yet, the gardens were not overgrown. They were perfect. The tall hedges, the huge rounded flowering bushes behind which I played with my dolls, the long beautiful, even dusty, paths to all kinds of mysterious hidden places with garden sheds and greenhouses rich with the humid floral scent of geraniums all enraptured my maternal grandfather who held my hand as we explored together.
I was born while we lived there. I spent my early childhood in this summer place of flowers and its timeless old mansion with rooms upon rooms and a steep staircase winding up to the bell tower. There were tiny hallways that led mysteriously into other parts of the old mansion. Naturally there were rooms we couldn’t enter, and the old original Victorian-era vintage furniture was still there. It seemed to me, as a young child, this was the most wondrous of places, a place that had always been there and would always be there.
Black and white photos of my father’s family garnished the bookcases. Some were of a woman with curly dark hair whose resemblance I see every day in my youngest daughter’s face. One was her wedding photo. Others were memoirs of a triumphant tennis match won by my father, then an athletic, handsome young man. There were others of him on a horse having won an equestrian event. Later, my father would come clean on his disdain for horseback riding. He’d fallen once, and while quite badly hurt, was reprimanded harshly to get back on the horse and ride. He never rode after that.
Other photos were of three lovely, sun-kissed children clustered for the photographer on a stone wall on the property. They were my father, aunt, and uncle. My beautiful grandmother lovingly holding a baby in a long white christening gown was another photo among them. Occasionally there were photos of a stern-looking man in a wheelchair. They are all from a time so long gone that even now as I recall my own young summers there, tears come fast to remind me of a time so deeply personal. They are so beautiful but are so far away. Yet, on a deeply intuitive level, I knew that to find the strength to live in this time, I needed to remember where I came from, and reconnect with my earliest memories steeped in the essence of that time and place.
Even then, we lived in the shadow of another time. My parents and my sisters and I lived in the gardener’s house, which was a tiny picturesque cape-cod style house attached to the main greenhouse. I remember old fans in the room my sisters and I took our afternoon naps, and straw matting for flooring. I remember the old desk with a mirror over it as you first stepped in the little house and a square table in the middle of the room at which we ate our meals. I can see my grandfather writing a postcard at that desk. I remember my purple-flowered cotton bathing suit with a little skirt attached to it. I remember having to wait, along with my sister who was only a year younger than me until our baby sister woke from her nap so we could go swimming.
The place was a magical place, full of everything to awaken a child’s imagination. The silence that stretched almost hauntingly across the beautiful place must have absorbed and dissipated whatever sadness might have been there before us.
Whatever pain the man in the wheelchair might have endured, or the loss experienced by the beautiful dark-haired woman when her two babies died, were long forgotten, left to slip into the abyss of time. All that remained were memories of sunny days, florid treasures of what is now a most sacred precious beauty. Their hearts and minds were cured by that beauty. They had to have been. They must have gone there to hold each other and heal from life’s tumultuous times. There are always tumultuous times. There always were. There has never been a time when men didn’t start wars, cruelly torture and kill each other and leave babies to starve.
For that family then, two world wars, a great depression, hard times where my grandfather worked, the deaths of their own two infants all must have weighed heavily on their hearts and minds. They needed a place of beauty in which they could restore and renew their broken hearts and weary minds. So, they created one, a place that would remain, long after they had gone, to comfort, heal and speak to today’s hurting world, a world so broken that it doesn’t even realize how desperately it needs to come home to a place of silence, peace and vibrant flower gardens and graceful ponds and fountains and roadside stone walls, a place where sweet kisses in the sparkling moonlight are commonplace, a place where cruelty is nonexistent and kindness is everywhere.
How could they have endured their lives without that place? How does one live in a world rent open by bombs, poverty, hatred and war without beauty? Beauty is the cornerstone of civilization. It is the place into which we allow God to breathe new hope and life into our lives. Beauty is cultivated by the Spirit, and left for us as gifts from heaven to remind us where we’re going and from where we came. If we forget beauty, if we fail to be healed and uplifted by the experience of beauty, if we have become so hardened, so numb to the sublime healing essence of beauty, then we are lost. The dreary darkness of death has taken over and snuffed out of our souls any light from heaven.
Recently, something inside me has longed to return to that place. Today’s tumultuous times, wars and too many horrors to mention, has overrun our collective consciousness.
We have come to accept the unacceptable, seeing the terrors of the day as common fare and forgetting this nightmare, this darkened world, is not where we should live. While I truly believe we need to be sensitive and responsive to the suffering among us, our hearts are hungry for a much more beautiful, sacred, and profoundly deep experience. We have all, despite our childhoods and even difficult life experiences, experienced beauty. Life is full of it, if we look for it. For me, it was a profoundly sacred kind of beauty that filled my childhood with an experience that has informed my life with fragrance and color and peace ever since.
That beautiful place I experienced briefly as a child marked the end of an era which I was fortunate to have experienced. I had the rare gift of peeking in on a generation before my time, a stolen glimpse of a past that contained a jewel of such beauty, it would sweeten even the dullest days of my future life. Never again would I ever experience such beauty and such rich silence as I did as a child roaming around my grandparents Canadian home.
As a child, that place, memorialized iconically by life-sized
(Originally written in July 2007)
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