Gratitude, Grief, and Dry Eyes

I recently celebrated 68 trips around the sun.  I am overwhelmingly thankful for the life God has given me.  My feelings seem to vacillate between humble joyful thanksgiving and grieving around the losses I experience daily within my body, noticed often within my yoga practice. 

I have learned it is possible to live two opposites at the same time, so I cling to two scriptural ideas as I live both sides of this coin.

Truly I celebrate with the psalmist from Psalm 118: “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good.”  

I also reflect on Jesus’ passage from death to resurrection, and I know this pattern of death and resurrection has always been part of our ongoing seasons and years. But in my low moments, I see myself as a shrivelling grain of wheat falling to the earth (John 12:24.)

What a surprise - how did this aging happen so quickly?

This is the context for a story about myself I wrote at our CPY retreat. I was asked to imagine Jesus seeing me with a loving gaze the way I believe he looked at the woman at the well (John 4:1-42). What I wrote revealed my tension between grief and gratitude: 

Jesus looks me in the eye.  What does he see….brown eyes surrounded by wrinkly laugh lines, myopic.  I squint because I can’t really see him well without my glasses.

I used to wear contact lenses and then my eyes became itchy and dry. Now I must sit with a heated pad on my eyes at least ten minutes a day so they will manufacture tears.

But I have tears inside; tears for the tears my eyes no longer make without the use of a microwave heated pad; tears for the strands of white hair that used to be chestnut brown; tears for my wrinkled hands with loose skin which my youngest grandson likes to pinch and roll; tears for my knees that will no longer sit in hero pose.

Then I think of Sam, my youngest grandson, born with brown eyes that make tears, born with autism. His hands are smooth as they poke and squeeze the loose skin on mine. Would he have been born, would he be alive and sitting next to me in his 6-year-old wonder if my hands were still smooth? Would this heart of mine that has reached to God with thousands of prayers for Sam be here with love for him if my hands were smooth, if I could kneel in hero pose, if my eyes could make tears?

I wonder why my eyes don’t make tears anymore. What have I seen that has stopped the droplets from forming? What have I seen that now it takes something exceptionally sad for my eyes to make even one tear? I have seen so much beauty: the northern lights shape shifting in pinks and greens, the top peaks of the Rocky Mountains, cycling trails winding through terraced vineyards, my daughter dancing with grace and soul, my own children becoming loving parents, my husband across the table. Perhaps every time I held one of my eight beautiful grandchildren as tender infants, my eyes rebelled and said, “this is it –so much grace- I refuse to water anymore!”

So that is a fine way to understand my aging loose-skinned hands and my dry eyes.  But what about my knees that can no longer find a proper child’s pose or even go near to a hero pose?  Have I spent too long on them praying for my kids, my sisters, my husband, my grandkids- that would be consoling but not honest because I seldom pray on my knees!

So I find my glasses and look again at Jesus.  This time I see his gaze.  I know I am encountering perfect acceptance and love. My heart is peaceful.  I thank him for it all.  

Later I discovered the words of Kate Bowler which clearly articulated the conversation I was beginning to have with myself:

“Dear, dear body, I get it. Or at least I am starting to. You do not have an unlimited supply. You run out, and I need to listen…. I need to sense when you are struggling, and gently acknowledge that you are actually changing. That time and love and grief and life have worn themselves into my skin. Day by day. This is the beautiful, terrible evidence that we have lived”

And so I pray a blessing:

May we always be thankful. May we gently hold our griefs. May we honour our bodies as crucibles of our lived experience.

Reference for above quote:

Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection (Colorado Springs, CO: Convergent Books, 2022), 156, 157–158.