Thought I’d share a lovely rumination from the Wendell Berry novel I’ve been reading this week, Andy Catlett: Early Travels. If you don’t know Berry’s work, you should. His novels and short stories (all set in the same fictional town of Port William, Kentucky) are beautiful and moving, and his essays about community, religion, conservation, and literature are incisive, stimulating, and often unsettling (in a good way). Anyway, this little piece of narrative reflection really struck me for some reason, and reminded me of the centrality of my family in my life and of my love for my late grandfather.

“Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. . . . It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which, if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. . . . We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. . . . As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by birth and death is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. . . . Let us pray to be grateful to the last.”