To meet what is coming

Please accept with all my love this inner and outer chronicle of those last weeks of our old century and our old millennium – and the first weeks of your own beginnings  – when so many things were on their way to us, things we neither anticipated nor, in some cases, ever could have imagined.  This is the story of how we met them and were changed by them.  May we continue to meet what is coming to us with courage in our hearts.  – Gail Godwin, Evensong

These lines, on the last page of Gail Godwin’s gorgeous Evensong, have been ringing in my head for days.  I believe utterly that there is some hand at work out there – some design, even in the vastness – and therefore I’m not surprised that it was right now that I picked up Evensong.  I won’t even try to write about this vast, beautiful book, beyond saying that it moved me immensely.  Godwin grapples with issues of faith and doubt, evokes humanity in all of its flawed complexity, dives into the deepest manifestation of what it means to trust.  And I read, spellbound, until the end.  And then I found these last lines.

May we continue to meet what is coming to us with courage in our hearts.

Indeed.  Is there a more eloquent way to describe the topics I’ve struggled with here – so loquaciously, so repetitively, so inelegantly – for years?  I don’t think so.  And so I walk on.  Gazing at the world, at the nets of black branches against cornflower blue, at the glowing, ragged-edged moon rising in the dusky sky.  Trying, every single day, to meet what is coming to me with an open mind and heart full of trust.  My courage flags, my eyes fill with tears, I trip and fall.  And all I can do is wake up every morning and try again.