Glimpses

The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. 

~Kahlil Gibran

When I think about gratitude, why do I feel guilt instead? When time comes in prayer for praising, why am I silent so long? And when I find something to praise You for, why do I feel so stingy, so afraid, locking myself up and letting out only the tiniest wisps of me? Why am I not bubbling over?

It is not because I am in deep grief. It is not because You have gone away and left me, or even because it feels like You have. There are so many glimpses: Canada geese. Black cats running fast. Any cat jumping. The skin of an orange—the way, if you pinch right, it squirts oils that flare in the flame of a candle.


It is because I have forgotten to talk to You. To look at You. I am looking at everyone else, at global injustice, at my threadbare self. I am saying, I must be good in order to praise. I must be right. I must be bringing about shalom. No, past tense: I must have brought about shalom already. I must be willing to sacrifice absolutely. I cannot praise until there is rightness in the relation of all things, until there are no more babies too weak to blink flies out of their eyes. Until I myself am praiseworthy and the world is whole.

I fail at gratitude because I am afraid to believe that shalom will ever happen. In my heart I think the orange-skin flares are lying, they and the cats in their precision, the stabs of joy. The colors of clouds. The warm silences of love. All lying, promising a restoration that will never come. I assemble a tribunal of The Poor in the abstract, who accuse me of comfort and apathy, who say how dare I praise, as though there were no problems left to solve, as though their suffering were nothing. I collage from the gospels an airtight case against myself as a Rich Person, a camel with its whisker hairs stuck in a needle’s eye.

I forget miracle. I forget hope. I forget You were raised from the dead, past tense. I forget I am small, not God, not God, not God.

But what if I remembered? What if I stopped talking about You and talked to You? Or listened? What if I dared to meet your gaze in the beauty of laughter, in children’s dances, in bicycles slipping upright along streets? In the shining ribbon of a street after rain. What if I let the weight of existence, which I’ve never once lifted, which I have not been carrying though I strain and creak, rest where it always has, in You?

Shalom is total: I don’t have it unless every human does, every place. But still there are glimpses. I see them. I will not be afraid of this smallness, of waiting. I will pay attention. I will gather my mustard grain of faith and meet Your eyes. And then there will be no praise too small, and I will dare to go out into sorrow and let You hollow me out to hold joy.

~Stephanie Gehring