We Are Visited

It is our great and blessed fortune that our lives are never left to themselves alone. We are visited in ways that we can understand and in ways that are beyond our understanding by highlights, great moments of inspiration, quiet reassurances of grace, simple manifestations of gratuitous expressions of the goodness of life. These quiet things enrich the common life and give to the ordinary experiences of our daily grind a significance and a strength that steady and inspire. We are also surrounded by the witness of those others whose strivings have made possible so much upon which we draw from the common reservoir of our heritage. Those who have carried the light against the darkness, those who have persevered when to persevere seemed idiotic and suicidal, those who have forgotten themselves in the full and creative response to something that calls them beyond the farthest teachers of their dreams and their hopes.

We are surrounded also by the witness of the life of the spirit in peculiar ways that speak directly to our hearts and to our needs: those men and women who walk the pages of the holy book, those men and women with whom in our moments of depression and despair, and in our moments of joy and delight, we identify.

We are grateful to Thee, our Father, for all of the springs of joy and renewal and recreation that are our common heritage and our common lot. We offer in thanksgiving to Thee the fruits of our little lives that they may in turn be to others a source of strength and inspiration, that apart from us they may not find fulfillment and apart from them we may not know ourselves.

We thank Thee, our Father, for so holy a privilege and we offer our thanksgiving, our dedication, and our response, not only to Thee, but to the life which is ours.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 290-291
Originally published in The Centering Moment)

I only recently found and put up in my study pictures of my partner Leonel. They remind me of the ways that I am visited by him in the work that I do. The little moments by which I know that I am not alone.

That’s why, too, the picture of my family at my ordination is always shown in my study. I see my dad there, especially; and the Parker girls, so happy and laughing; and my aunts and uncles and cousins, all of them delighted in that moment of my life, of our life.

“We offer in thanksgiving to Thee the fruits of our little lives . . .”

The photographs so remind me that in every place and at just about every time, if I pay attention, I an visited.