I ran across this quote today and it took my breath away a little bit:

"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest him -- a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering.

Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown.

And when He did die it was sad -- such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was.

There is so little to remember of anyone -- an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long,"

- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.

Comments

[Diann Vera]

I wore a yellow shirt yesterday and I didn't cry. I just felt the familiar ache like I do every time I drive to Millville or think to myself "I have to tell Chris about this..." I hurt every day, but in a way it keeps her close. I suspect this is what the quote is saying.