Advent Day Twenty | Raw

Lead
by Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

My heart. My heart is broken. It is raw and sore and remembers a time when it did not feel SO MUCH. It feels so much. And, that, my friends, is grace - raw, unadulterated, unqualified grace. I loathe it. (I wouldn't want to live without it).

Given the chance, I'd put my heart back together. It's inconceivable to think that I wouldn't right all the wrongs that broke it in the first place, given the chance. Oh, I would right the wrongs. But, I can't. And, so my heart is broken.

Grace, raw and ready, seeps in and out and refuses to let it close again. It hurts.

Given the chance, I'd never put my heart back together if it meant never knowing what was lost. I would never want to forget. Or to never have experienced. Or to never have seen or heard.

Yes, I am willing. Isn't that the point?