The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Lane Belden C.;

Author:Lane, Belden C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 1998-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

What allows this prayer to be glorious and not obscene is the mystery that the third section of this book explores.

I realize one must ever be wary of romanticizing illness and death. In looking back on the experience I’ve shared with my mother, there was nothing “beautiful” in her dying. It smelled of vomit and uncleaned teeth. It was relentlessly monotonous. Yet I have to be honest in sharing the mystery it also occasioned. Susan Sontag speaks eloquently of the risks involved in using illness as a metaphor—whether romantically celebrating tuberculosis as a disease of sensitive artists in the nineteenth century or associating cancer with obscene hopelessness today.4

I want to shun every abstraction in presuming to find deep, instructive “meaning” in my mother’s death. But I must also recognize and honor the fact that she and I both learned something about love—through the long and torturous experience of her dying—in a way we’d never known before.

“On each of my dyings shed your light and your love,” Saint Ignatius Loyola prayed.5 There are dyings to which one is drawn throughout his life, little dyings rooted in the exercise of abandonment or “indifference.” Maybe they prepare us, in their own way, for a love that’s never guaranteed. One finds it, if at all, in a final act of relinquishment—beyond all experience, beyond anything yet known.

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