Walking the Wall

I just finished Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund this morning in a quiet house looking out the backyard to a world covered in white and the perfect kind of snow falling like powdered sugar from a sifter Back in the corner standing out from all the white and grey and black that makes the scene look like it was shot in black and white film stands a bright red shed. In some odd way, that about sums up the book for me–it was at times elating, tragic, yearning, and triumphant–much of it was a spiritual journey that doesn’t end in any grand conclusions about spirituality, but ends in hope (I wrote a bit more about it here).

The idea of spirituality as hope made me think about the ideas of eternity that have been bouncing around in my head after having a string of connections: It started with my studying of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love last semester when she wrote, “Also in this he showed a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut in the palm of my hand; and it was round as a ball. I looked there upon with the eye of my understanding and thought: What may this be? And it was generally answered this: It is all that is made” (Ch. 5). She goes on to talk about how it all endures. Last week my daughter was asking me about the “to everything there is a season” song and in finding it and then the passage it came from and then rereading Ecclesiastes (which is a gorgeous, poetic book) I found this little phrase, “He has also set eternity in the human heart” (3:11). That started a niggling in my brain of a passage of poetry that I eventually had the “aha” moment and found from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Gorgeous. THIS reminded me (ah, seeing the inner workings of my not always so linear brain patterns) of a couple passages in Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth: “Eternal is beyond time. The concept of time shuts out eternity” (280), and “the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things…is the function of life” (85). It got me thinking that if eternity is in every moment, than death really becomes somewhat of simply a punctuation mark.

Which made me think of a rock my friend had given me, which led me to my picture of the day.