It is remarkable to me, the power of an unfilled morning. Space. The space of time. What such a thing opens within me. Today’s space afforded me the opportunity for more than 5 minutes of sound-bite living, more than 5 minutes to test a reading to see if it could capture my perpetually rolling attention.
A short story from Image journal called Pilgrimage, by Paula Huston won…both my time and attention. As I finished, tears were slowly making their way down my face. Not convulsively, but ache-ingly. The story captures the life of a competent middle-aged daughter wrestling with the power of an even more accomplished, yet distant father…and the wake of love unexplored it had created. She meets an old friend of her father, who in the end tells her that her father “always carried a picture of you, a new one every time I saw him. …How could you not know it? She stared him, stunned…”
As I pondered the significance of this against the story line, I realized that like her I, too, so long for such unbridled affection…or perhaps to know about it towards me. I ache for it, but mostly don’t even know that I do. And, in my unwitting compensation for it, I endlessly am doing things. Only occasionally, like this morning, do I recognize what a good portion of all the doing is all about, to fill or to get someone to fill this gaping hole within me. I so longed to waken Tami, have her read the story, try to explain what it aroused with me, …hoping for an attempt on her part to shovel something into the hole for me. I know she can’t do this, at least in the way I think I want. But, I still want her to try. I still want everyone to try. But, because that would be too obvious – my desire for love, complete undeserved acceptance, I seek both through endless activity for everyone around me. This is a sweetly painful revelation, not completely new, but nonetheless fresh.
And the irony, and tearfully sad to me, is that I wonder if the depth of affection the main character in the story felt from and for her father is a similar kind of tragedy with my own daughters, especially Makenzie. Who, like the father in the story, I adore, but that I also wonder whether she knows the 'picture' of her I carry in my mind. My eyes swell again…for her sake, and the ‘wake’ in her life.
I wonder what kind of nexus this is all about today as I consider the pace of the last few years, the space of this morning, another summer which always seems to bring about its annual respite and changes, and the fact today is my father’s birthday….
God, you pierce me this morning, but I am grateful to know that it is you, both in my aching for, and from, you.
