Life is way too serious.

Mama’s Petticoats

“God speaks to each of us as we are made, then walks with us silently out of the night.  These are the words we dimly hear:  You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing.  Embody me.  Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.  Let everything happen to you:  beauty and horror.  Just keep going.  No feeling is final.  Don’t let yourself lose me.  Nearby is the country they call life.  You will know it by its seriousness.  Give me your hand.”

                                                        Rainer Marie Rilke

          Life seems especially serious in these days of war and unrelenting reminders of human fragility. Often, my grandmother’s words come to me. “Life can get so tedious,” she would say.  She pronounced it “te-jous;” to her it was a fancy word.  She grew up, eldest of eleven children, on a tenant farm in north Alabama---cotton planted row upon row as far as the eye could see.  I remember walking down the long rows at age four, sun-browned, barefooted, dragging a long burlap sack behind me.  My great-grandparents called it “pulling” cotton; putting one boll at a time into the sack, feeling the prickly pod beneath the soft wooly fur.  For me it was play, but when I think of her now, spending her own girlhood in endless rows of cotton under the blazing Alabama sun, I can understand how “te-jous” slipped into her vocabulary.

Sometime, in the relatively recent past, God’s message pushed its way through to me.  “Let everything happen to you:  beauty and horror.  Just keep going.”  It’s all the same.  Perhaps this is even the way life is meant to be, like turning a beautiful piece of wood and sanding off the rough places, then turning again and sanding some more.  It’s got to have rough places so you can appreciate the beauty when it’s finished.

          My grandmother loved to laugh.  She was the kind of joke-teller who never botched the punch line.  Then she’d laugh loud and slap her leg.  She knew you had to grab happiness with both hands when it presented itself, else you might be taking this tedious life way too seriously.  She wore red lace petticoats under lavender, cotton dresses.  I like to think this was a reminder to herself that, even in the toughest of times, a good red petticoat goes a long way toward easing the burden. 

I don’t know how to embody God but, thanks to Mama, I do know how to wear a bit of red lace, and how to laugh and slap my leg.

                                        Thanks be to God,

                                        Jane