It Feels Great To Be Alive

Edward Hopper, 1927

The other day I ran into a William Butler Yeats’ poem I have loved for many years. Here the great poet suggests what it feels like, unexpectedly, suddenly, to know, without a doubt, we are blessed. We are overcome with great happiness. In my language, this is what it feels like to be struck by grace. When this happens, we discover, not only am I blessed, but I can bless. To be blessed changes everything.

Listen to Yeats:    

My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On a marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed,

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Haven’t you been there before? I know I have. Here we are, just sitting there gazing about in a crowded coffee shop, wrapped in our own solitude, even amidst the bustle, thinking about the years flying by, and suddenly, like a blaze out of nowhere, we are lifted out of ourselves into great happiness. We are overpowered by joy. We are blessed.

Ronald Rolheiser, in his book Sacred Fire, imagines merely walking down the street and suddenly, unable to contain ourselves, we burst out: “God, it feels great to be alive!” This is a kind of prayer, filled with gratitude for the gift life. Oh how blessed we are.

I know, I know, anxiety and sorrow and grief and loneliness and pain, often physical as well as emotional, grip our lives and preoccupy our attention. I know our societal conversation is so loaded down with fear, looming catastrophe, the dysfunction of institutions, our utter dividedness, the air full of hatred settling down like dirty fog—how then can we possibly imagine our bodies ablaze with happiness? Feels remote, doesn’t it? Blessed, really?

But this is how God inserts himself into our lives, isn’t it? The reflections I’ve been doing over the past years is how we can ready ourselves better to receive God’s visitation? Yes, to be sure, grace strikes suddenly and surprisingly, from no doing of our own, but I have come to believe we can indeed prepare ourselves to receive this visit. We can learn how simply to be attentive, to be sure, but even more, as the ancients teach us, we can prepare ourselves through prayer and meditation and holy reading, those spiritual practices handed down through the generations. What we seek here is to create receptive hearts that are open to the sudden blaze of grace.  

Henri Nouwen, in his marvelous The Way Of The Heart, having gathered the wisdom of the third century Desert Fathers, affirms with these monastic saints the need for solitude and silence in the midst of hectic lives. If we can find time for these practices, regularly, even daily, we will find a kind of solitude that is “transforming.”

This is “the place of conversion,” says Nouwen, “where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs.” In this kind of solitude, Nouwen continues,

I get rid of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me—naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken—nothing.

We simply open our hearts and invite the God of the universe to come closer. And he does.

Yeats’ poem of blessing, and this experience of transforming solitude described by Nouwen, comes as we are released from trying to figure things out. Here, in solitude, we quiet our chattering minds. We are freed from winning arguments, getting the universe in order, defending our faith. As we enter this kind of solitude, things get settled, questions answered. Suddenly we realize, we don’t need to control the world. We simply yield, surrender. God stoops down, as the Psalmist says it, into our little world, and things light up with a joy far beyond our grasp.

This is the deepest of antidotes for our lives of anxiety and fear and frustration. And I am convinced it can happen more often if we are willing to sit, silently, each morning, as if in preparation for our bodies to receive this visit from God.

Yes, indeed, we will say, again and again, doesn’t it feel great to be alive? We are blessed indeed. We feel enabled to bless. We feel changed. We feel we can change the world.