Not Everything is Lost

“Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
"If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately."

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. "Help,"
said the flight agent. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
"Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit- se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, "No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let's call him."

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend— by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Not everything is lost. I love this story poem by Naomi Shiab Nye. It describes beautifully what it means to truly live sacramentally, what it means to bless those we meet, to live by blessing, isn’t this true communion a love fest, a true love fest. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. This is how we are meant to live spiritually alive. Yes, we can all be lost at times, but it does not mean all is lost, we can soon be found.

Not everything is lost.

Last Saturday, evening I was talking with one of the regulars of “Colours of Grief”, she was utterly lost. Not necessarily with the grief that comes with death, more living grief. She was deeply lost within herself, so much so that she was finding it really difficult to connect with anything. She was almost in the same panicked state as the woman in Naomi’s poem. I walked her to her car when suddenly a British Bulldog appeared from out of the twilight. He ran straight towards me, jumping up my legs as dogs do. His tale was going like billy-ho

We instantly stopped our conversation and were consumed with concern for the dog. He had no collar and we wondered where the “ummer” he had come from. My friend suddenly forgot all her troubles and was focused purely on finding this lost dog’s home. My phone rang and I became distracted by another crisis. We searched around and noticed the gates of next doors house was open, so we approached and knocked on the door. A man answered and his wife and children came to the door. It was their dog “Buzby” who had got out. How on earth they hadn’t noticed is beyond me. They are new neighbours and I had not met them before. The dad did make me chuckle when he told me the dog’s name “Buzby, as in sir Matt”, he is obviously a Manchester United fan.

It was lovely to get the lost wandering dog home. What was equally so was the impact it had on my friend, how she responded to its needs, she suddenly wasn’t so lost herself in her troubles, it was beautiful to witness.

This all brought to mind a quote I often see posted on social media “Not all who wander are lost”, it comes from the “Lord of the Rings”. It is certainly true, just because someone is wandering aimlessly it doesn’t mean that they are lost, Buzby wasn’t he was just wandering round the neighbourhood, but he could have easily found his way back home, it was we who intervened. It also got me thinking that all who are lost do not necessarily wander. You can be lost in the most familiar of places, in the safest places, surrounded by loving company, as my friend had been. She was lost oh so deeply within herself. Somehow by helping Buzby find his way home, she found herself at home in herself once again. I admire my friend greatly as even though she doubts it she always seems to find her way back home despite her very real troubles.

Most folk are familiar with the phrase “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Socratres is reputed to have said it at his trial when he was found guilty of impiety and corrupting of the youth. He chose death rather than exile. For if he was in exile he would be unable to continue to examine life. As Socrates trusted his religious experiences such as his guiding “daimonic voice” he preferred to seek truth in the after-life, than to live a life not identifying the answer on earth. He would rather die than live an unexamined life.

It is vital to know ourselves, to be true to ourselves. Although the most important knowledge to know is that we are mortal, we are not God’s at least according to those great thinkers of ancient Greeks. To “Know thyself” is to know that you are mortal, you are not God.

So yes “The unexamined life is not worth living”, that said I have also found that that an over examined life can become stagnant. It is so easy to get lost in ourselves, so lost that we fail to live and find it impossible to engage with life fully. When this happens life can feel like it isn’t worth living. To quote good old Forrest church

..."an overexamined life is not worth living. I know that. some of you who come to me for couselling are so wrapped up in your own and your parents' underwear that I sometimes wonder if you will ever get out, if you will ever get naked. Just remember, you are not alone on the Titanic. we are all here together, on this extraordinary ship - different classes, yes, and not enough lifeboats - but when it comes to death there are never enough lifeboats. the ship is magnificent but one day it will sink. All hands will be lost.

This advice may return to haunt you, but I commend you to ignore life's dangers as readily as you protect yourself from them. Even as an overexamined life is not worth living, an overplanned life lacks wonder and sponteneity. The harder we work to get things exactly right, the more cautious we become, the more careful not to fail. Risking nothing, we stand to gain little beyond the security of battened-down existance. We miss the sea breeze and the ball. We will know little failure, or only little failures, but consider the cost. any sure thing is almost sure to be so carefully packaged that when we unwrap it, the size of the box will turn out to be so many times larger than the size of the gift that we cannot help but be dissapointed.”

We do not have to wander to feel lost, we do not have to step out into the wilderness, the unknown. It is just as easy to get lost in the most familiar, to be lost in ourselves, so much so that we fail to live. We are communal beings, we are in this together and do you know what we often only truly find ourselves in the love and service for one another, this it seems is where true meaning emerges. This is often where we truly find ourselves, our purpose.

We all feel lost and confused at times and we all find ways to help and encourage, to keep one another going. I love the wisdom of the greats, but they are not really my inspirations. It is the ordinary folk all around that I admire the most, that change my life. It was an ordinary man from Oldham that guided me when I was most lost, not Socrates or Frankl, Jesus or Gandhi, they have helped, but were not the real inspirations. I do not stand on the shoulders of giants. More ordinary folk, those that stumbled along a lot, those that fell many times, but rose again. They had no special wisdom or power, in fact they constantly messed up, they often failed. That said they were filled with love and courage, they were perfectly imperfect. They got up every time they fell, they kept on going and encouraged others to do so too. They helped others and each other to reach what seemed unreachable, they inspired others to do the same. When I am gone I hope that no one tries to stand on my shoulders, I am certainly no giant. I am more interested in walking shoulder to shoulder with others, inspiring each other, offering courage and bringing out the best in each other, just as Buzby did in the Twilight of last Saturday.

We all feel lost at times, but we can always be found again. No one needs to lead, nor does anyone have to follow. We all take our turn, just like those Canada Geese I love so much and their honking.

As Naomi wrote “And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world.… This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

I saw this once again last Saturday and I have been witnessing it all week. I have seen over and over again that when we feel lost we are found again through our shared interdependence, this is how we are sheltered and saved. My friend and “Buzby” the bulldog showed me that once again in the twilight last Saturday. All is not lost, faith, hope and love will always lead us home. This is the world in which we all share. “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

So, know yourself, know that you are mortal and know that no matter how different you might feel, how lost it all seems, no one is anymore lost than anyone else and no one is anymore different than anyone else.

Not everything is lost.

We all feel lost at times, it is important to accept this. The problem isn’t getting lost, we all get lost. The problem is in losing faith that you can be found once again. The key is how we live when we find ourselves lost. Do we close down and get lost deeper in our fear, or do we pause and reach out and ask for help from those loving forces that are all around whether visible or invisible.

Also when we see another lost, or hear their call. How do we respond? Do we stay lost in our own or others underwear or do we ourselves answer the call?

Not everything is lost. All is not lost. No one is ever truly lost, we can always find our way back home.

below is a video devotion based 

on the material in this "Blogspot"

It comes in the little things

I love the farmer poet Wendell Berry. The following “Sabbaths” is a favourite. It is sometimes thought to be about death, a bleak piece. It isn’t really, what it is about is generosity; generosity is about living and doing so by giving.

Sabbaths – 1993, I

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are

that possibility you were.

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

You have become a sort of grave

containing much that was

and is no more in time, beloved

then, now, and always.

And you have become a sort of tree

standing over a grave.

Now more than ever you can be

generous toward each day

that comes, young, to disappear

forever, and yet remain

unaging in the mind.

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

Generosity is about the heart; it does not require material abundance to live by generosity When I think of the gifts that have been given to me in my life, I do not think of material things, what comes to mind is the loving gift of their presence that folk shared, their love and their support, and their inspiration. They gave of themselves, truly from their own often breaking and vulnerable hearts. To me this is the true spirit of Christmas.

This year, the last two years, have been a difficult struggle for most of us. It has been hard to keep going at times. I have struggled myself in so many ways. Yes, I have given all that I have, perhaps more, as have so many others. I am not alone. I have also gratefully received from so many too, haven’t we all. I was approached in the street the other day. The person just wanted to ask how I was and to thank me, to simply say “ thank you for all that you do.” Gosh I cannot tell how grateful I felt in that moment. I have known and witnessed so much love, born in the human heart. On Christmas Eve as I shared our Christmas Eve service I do not believe I have known and experienced a love anything like it. It was so beautiful I could have wept. I did as I refelt it all a little later. As I awoke on Christmas morning I did so with the broadest most beaming smile.

This Advent season has not been easy, a struggle at times. I know it has been for most of us. What has lifted my heart and kept me going has been a simple phrase “it comes in the little things”. It all began the week beginning 13th December. I had gone to bed in a bit of state. I was stressed, I was exhausted, my gland had swelled up below my chin. I was dehydrated and utterly exhausted. My mood was very low, the next day I decided to take things a little easier. I felt I had hit another rock bottom. I found myself going deeper into prayer. I went for a walk that afternoon, in an attempt to connect with life. When I retuned, there was a lovely gift left on the step of the chapel house. There were two tubes of milky bar buttons, left by a friend who knows I am a bit of a “Milky Bar Kid”. As the day continued I found the following phrase singing in my heart “it comes in the little things”. So, I posted online about the gift and the things I noticed that day. I have been doing so ever since.

On awakening each morning, I have considered the day before and expressed my thanks by talking of the little things I have noticed in my life that have lifted my heart, that have given me hope, that have helped me stay connected and thus overcome any sense of despair. It has helped and I know it has helped others. It has been my attempt to offer thanks and to live in and through gratitude. I have decided to continue it into the New Year. Each morning I am going to share those little things, that are truly everything. Maybe it is something we could all try. Think each day what are the little things, that lift your heart, that connect you to life and others and inspire you to live in love and gratitude throughout that day. Please feel free to share them. In so doing we can keep these gifts alive; in so doing we become givers ourselves, as we pass these gifts along. To paraphrase good old Wendell Berry, every day we have less reason not to give ourselves away.

The phrase is inspired by the following poem “Immanence” by Evelyn Underhill

“Immanence” by Evelyn Underhill

I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord;
Not borne on morning wings
Of majesty; but I have set my feet
Amidst the delicate and bladed wheat
That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod—
There do I dwell, in weakness and in power;
Not broken or divided, said our God!
In your straight garden plot I come to flower;
About your porch my vine,
Meek, fruitful, doth entwine,
Waits, at the threshold, Love's appointed hour.

I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord;
Yea, on the glancing wings
Of eager birds, the soft and pattering feet
Of furred and gentle beasts, I come to meet
Your hard and wayward heart. In brown bright eyes
That peep from out the brake, I stand confest.
On every nest
Where feathery Patience is content to brood
And leaves her pleasure for the high emprise
Of motherhood—
There does my Godhead rest.

I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord;
My starry wings I do forsake,
Love's highway of humility to take;
Meekly I fit my stature to your need.
In beggar's part
About your gates I shall not cease to plead
As man, to speak with man
Till by such art
I shall achieve my immemorial plan;
Pass the low lintel of the human heart.

Obviously it is the line “I come in the little things, thus saeth the Lord”, that has inspired my musings and awakened my heart. That the Divine love is present in everything, although sometimes it is easy not to notice. The last few weeks have reminded me I need to keep paying attention to those little things. It is not in the glitz and the glammer and the loudness, I don’t notice it there. I witness it in the little things, those that we don’t always notice. Annette, the editor of our magazine reminded me to “Keep on enjoying the blackbird singing, the scruffy (scratty actually) magpie and the wild geese flying over. There's also the cherry blossom which will appear surprisingly soon in the scheme of things.” These are the beautiful and natural things that lift my heart, when sometimes it feels like it has fallen. It comes in the little things, the ordinary things, these are the true blessings of life.

“I am done with great things” wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James in a letter to a friend. Sharing his conviction that his focus was no longer on big or grand things, but with the small almost invisible decisions. He wrote:

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”

The Letters of William James, ed. by his son Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthy Press, 1920), 2:90; letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899.

It comes in the little things, the miraculous is to be found in the mundane. Annie Dillard wrote: “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.” She had a way of unmasking the extraordinary dimensions of the ordinary life. In “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” (1974) she describes how a simple act of adventurous generosity can bring joy to the ordinary.

“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.”

There are ways to bring simple joys to one another’s lives, often through our playfulness and generosity, just like that friend who left those “Milky Bar” buttons on my doorstep.

It is the little things that keep us going through the dark and difficult. Sometimes we can lose sight of them, or we can forget about them. Thankfully there are others who can help remind us of these things, that lift our hearts, when they have fallen, when we feel we cannot go on.

There is a wonderful example of this in the final pages of JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”

Frodo and Sam are nearing the end of their quest, they are desperate and struggling as they try to reach the cursed Mount Doom to cast the ring of power, a device that held much of the dark lord Sauron’s power, into the fires and destroy it. The closer they get to the mountain the more desperate their situation grows. They are weakened physically and spiritually, all hope seems to have gone. Frodo the hero is dispirited and so Sam, his loyal and constant companion, does his best to lift up his hopes. He asks him if he remembers the taste of strawberries and cream, the sound of water, the beauties of spring in their far-off home, the Shire. Sam lifts up Frodo’s spirit, by reminding him of the little things and thus he finds the courage to carry on, to go and complete his task. The power was found in the love of such little things. Afterall it is the little things that really matter, that make our lives what they are. “I come in the little things, thus saeth the Lord”

It matters what we do and what we do not do, they impact on one another’s lives. Some say what does it matter what we as individuals do, it will make no difference. It isn’t true though is it. I just have to think of those “milky bar” buttons, they made a world of difference to me. Or at least they helped to turn me around. I responded in love and I know by simply sharing the little things, I have been able to impact positively on the lives of others. Who knows what positive impacts that might be having on many others too. Just because we cannot do everything, we seem insignificant, yet what we do can make the world of difference. As Edward Everett Hale said:

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” – Edward Everett Hale

Like everyone I feel deep sadness at times. I have felt it recently, as I have struggled with my personal life and the suffering of so many others. That said I do not descend into total despair, I get lifted up once again by some simple ordinary gifts of life. There are blessings everywhere, we just need to pay attention.

I have never known a love deeper, than I have these last few days, “no greater love has there ever been, than what felt for you, what you gave to me, you saved my life from this…So many tears, so many tears…”

It comes in the little things, the almost unnoticed things. All we have to do is pay attention and share what we have with one another.

“I come in the little things, saeth the Lord”

Below is a video based on the material in this "blogspot"