December 27: "Lead," Heartbroken, "Going My Way"

Mary Oliver lets the world break her heart . . . 

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.

For Oliver, having your heart broken is not necessarily a terrible thing.  It means that you have experienced love--for a person or place or animal or bird or tree or lake or comet or book or poem.  To be in a constant state of heartbreak, then, allows light to touch the dark corners of the soul, those places that every person keeps locked up and hidden from the rest of the universe.

I spent my day at the library mapping out February programs and events.  That's my job--always thinking about and planning for the future.  The one bad thing about doing this is that I often don't enjoy a lot of what is happening in the present.  Thus, by the time the holidays roll around in December, I'm already at Valentine's Day or St. Patrick's Day or, sometimes, summer.

I have to make a conscious decision simply to focus on what is right in front of my face.  I got home this afternoon around 4 p.m. and took a walk because it was sunny and warm.  I wanted to enjoy the greenness of this December.  The sun was quickly descending, and, at one point, I stopped and watched it touch the trees and houses with gold.  And I felt my heart breaking open for all the people and things I hold dear.

When I got home, I decided to watch a movie, and I streamed Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald.  It was one of my parents' favorite movies.  Whenever it aired on TV, we watched it together.  It's a very Catholic film, with its two stars playing priests.  (SPOILER ALERT:  I'm going to talk about the ending of the film.)  At the conclusion, Barry Fitzgerald's character--an old man in the golden years of his vocation--is reunited for this first time in 46 years with his mother from Ireland.

I remember always crying a lot as a kid when I watched that scene.  This evening, I found myself again crying so hard that I couldn't even see the screen.  Time seemed to collapse around me.  I was a seven-year-old watching the movie with my parents.  I was a teenager watching the movie by myself after being dumped by a girlfriend.  I was an adult watching my father breathe his last breaths in the hospital.  I was an adult holding my mother's hand for the last time before she died.  I was so many heartbroken versions of myself.

And, for those two Going My Way hours today, I was reminded how important it is to love the here-and-now world.  To hold everything close.  To cherish this fragile life.

Saint Marty hopes that everyone reading these words have hearts that are broken open, that never close again to this beautiful, beautiful world.