One Step Further

If there is an end, then there is no God. Creation by God never ends, so creation of your movements never ceases. The moment you say, "I have got it," you have lost everything you had. As soon as something comes, you have to go one step further. BKS Iyengar

R said goodbye to her father yesterday in a church in S that stank of incense. I was feeling nauseous and the incense just made things worse. The priest was so old; are there any young priests anymore? Death, we were told, is not to be mourned but celebrated because the dead while gone from us rest now with God.

But death and funerals do make me sad, mourn, and grieve. I thought of my father, gone now almost two years, and missed him terribly especially his hands and his face which I will never see again. Driving successfully to S through the mangle of streets that is Cambridge and Boston, I was reminded of how my father taught me to drive, offensively, on those mean streets, to get around when the getting around isn't easy, to take things into my own hands, to go in the direction I have set my mind towards even though I have never been there before. Not enough fathers teach such things to daughters, the right to an assertiveness that isn't always pretty but gets things done.

I thought I had "gotten it" this thing of grief, of loss, of letting go. But in that smoke filled church was reminded that this is not so. There is no end to letting go, no getting the hang of it, of knowing how to make it easier and less painful. Perhaps the dead rest with God, but for the living, I think, that old priest missed something of beauty when he told us not to mourn. For the living, God exists precisely in the sorrow, the darkness, the places that are not known, not fully explored, that remain, waiting for us, one step further beyond the light.