It has been such a special time with you and I have luxuriated in all these moments of fellowship. I cannot be grateful enough for all these gifts of love. The heart-to-heart chats, the beautiful walks, and my young grandchild’s hugs all serve as a wonderful immersion in love.
These past years of Covid have stolen such meetings from too many. Heart-stopping to think of all the fellowships that ended in permanent separation on this earthly plane. There are no words for those who faced such endings. So, it is with utter gratitude I find myself with loved ones these days. I am appreciative of health to enjoy such company and to have weathered this pandemic. Perhaps some of us have emerged scarred from all that has happened. Changed creatures from what we were before. I feel my brain is not what it used to be. No matter, perhaps recovery will take time. That is my hope and, in the meantime, I relish connections with loved ones that seem to stretch with love past the veil of brain fog and communicate heart-to-heart. I don’t have to be 100% to bask in love and laughter.
Perhaps love, that cord that stretches even past death, is how we all must hold onto that which is vital. I am enjoying CS Lewis’s diary, who knew his spelling, was almost as bad as mine? When called up to serve in World I he wrote to his father to come and see him before he was shipped off to France. He would subsequently find himself on his 19th birthday on the front lines in the Somme Valley and lose his university flatmate and best friend Paddy Moore on those muddy killing fields. His father didn’t visit, not even when his son returned to hospital in the UK injured from France. C.S. Lewis’s words on this haunt me dreadfully, “my father was a very peculiar man, in some respects: in non more than an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence.” How true it is, that we have to sometimes break free from dull routines which blind us to the real priorities. I felt travelling to see you was the break I needed to remind myself of how precious such steps are in all our lives.
“Deal ye one with another with the utmost love and harmony, with friendliness and fellowship . . . This goal excelleth every other goal, and this aspiration is the monarch of all aspirations.”
Bahá’u’lláh
