This Morning Remembering

John Singer Sargent, Mountain Stream, ca 1912

I was remembering this morning, nothing in particular, I suppose, just remembering, but flickering across my mind was one of those bright images out of the past. Wordsworth called them “spots of time,” some event that penetrated deeply. We carry the image with us for the rest of our lives. I’ve been trying lately to pay attention when those images do indeed flicker. I’ve come to believe they might hold some healing power for our anxious lives, a kind of “balm in Gilead / to make the wounded whole.”  

Maybe this is one of the ways God holds us together. Maybe we could be helped, immensely, if we could remember, more often, those spots of time when the world would shine out brightly, beautifully, hinting at something deeper, some sense that God was nearby.

I remember, vividly, for example, going down to my favorite fishing hole, down into the deep part of Oak Creek Canyon. I was probably ten or eleven years old. Getting down to the hole was part of the joy, proud as I was of my youthful agility, leaping from rock to rock, until I arrived at the blue-green, shimmering hole. I would keep myself back under the shade of the trees on the shore, in part as cover from the August sun, but as well to keep from startling the rainbow trout in my pool. Finally, I would venture close to the water to cast my line—and suddenly, startlingly, the trout would dart from one end of the pool to the other. I’d catch my breath. I was discovered, but exhilarated to feel so close to these magnificent creatures. It was a spot in time, indeed, something worth remembering.

Gerard Manley Hopkins felt something like my little moment in his poem “Pied Beauty”:

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

I want to be on the watch in this varied, playful, dazzling world. I want to give glory to God for “dappled things,” like the “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.” And then I want to remember these moments as I grow older. I want my imagination to spin out in wonder as I remember. I want to feel the urge to give paise, even as we live in a world so dour and grim.

In her poem “Intermission,” Luci Shaw reflects on this “season for remembering / and recollection.” I take it from the poem it has something to do with growing older, but it is worth recognizing, she believes, that remembering can gather the fragments of our lives together at any age.  

My memory gathers fragments of

the old past, recollecting flood, and storm,

but also the starling blue of delphiniums and

the rosy breast feathers of the house finch.

How together we discovered the hidden

geometry of rocks. Now, it all shows up

for me to recognize and remember.

I’ve come to see that Luci Shaw avoids sentimentality because she refuses to give into easy cynicism. In part I think her distinctiveness comes because she continues to gather her life around vivid memory. We have much to learn from this.

What if we are able

to make sense

of our lives, holding them, all and everything,

secure in the small jewel boxes of recollection

and forgiveness. . . .

Well, that’s the kind of thing I was thinking about this morning. Through all the turmoil in which we are living, and through our obsessive attention to the dark sides of things, causing fear and anxiety in ourselves, just maybe this kind of remembering is the balm we need to heal ourselves and our world. I don’t buy anymore that this is irresponsible escapism or some kind of vacuous nostalgia. Rather I think remembering is one way God gives us to hold our lives together. Maybe all those memories can bring the healing for which we long, for which our world so desperately yearns.