I got together yesterday with a small group of old crocks. We’re not formal about the way we describe ourselves. It’s an Opus Dei cooperators’ group. Cooperators aren’t members of the Work, but they do take part in activities, contribute volunteer work and often a bit of money. They don’t have to be Catholic, or even Christian, and the literature says there are even some cooperator atheists, although in my limited circle everyone is a Catholic.
Almost all of us there are in our seventies or eighties. There are retired engineers, physicians, economists. One of us, who is in his late seventies, started out as a professional baseball player in the minor leagues, went to seminary for a while, and then spent years as a Department of Justice civil rights investigator.
We read the daily Gospel passage, discuss a spiritual topic, and wind up with a meditation. Afterwards, there may be some small talk, but yesterday was different. One of us began to speak of something personal. It wasn’t about the successes of a long life, or about a professional shortcoming, but about a failure of another kind. He’s a man who has overcome serious illnesses, including heart failure, and yet he thinks he suffers from the most serious illness of all, a failure of love.
He thinks that he hasn’t loved close family members the way he should have. He believes he’s let them down. It’s a feeling, as one gets older, that can be a torment of a moral kind. It’s perhaps as painful in its own way as a physical agony.
I know from my own experience that a torment of this sort doesn’t go away. It’s something one lives with. It can’t be taken away by any one of us, and we can’t cure it or remove it by ourselves.
I tried to say something useful. The poem beneath says it more concisely than I did at the time.
AN OLD MAN ASKED ME…
An old man asked me: How can I repair
The errors of the decades and despair,
For I have loved too feebly and too late
My child, my wife, my love is intestate
And now I have no loving as bequest
Sufficient to my wish, my love was less,
Nor can a vanished sacrifice give twice
For what must be unequal sacrifice,
And now my heart is dying, I must leave
Behind the wounds that love will not relieve
Then I had to answer that the wound
Is bottomless, in time will not heal soon,
That only One who lives eternally
Can heal and close this living injury,
But meanwhile never falter or look back
At what was never done, or done had lacked,
For it belongs to One who keeps entire
The treasuries of love and love’s desire,
And these He will dispense when time is done –
He serves all things, all loves in unison
Pavel,
Interesting coincidence that your post and Kevin’s appear together today. Your poem, lovely as always, and his eloquent prose are about the same thing really: human inadequacy.
The second greatest pain there is–the second most severe non-physical pain isn’t betrayal by others–as bad as that hurts–but our own betrayals–remorse, regret, for things done and not done, our own failures. People we should have loved and didn’t, kindnesses we should have shown and didn’t, the offense against someone that we should have kept to ourselves, the offense against ourselves we should have overlooked and didn’t.
Ash Wednesday approaches. It’s in our very bones, isn’t it? We know when it’s time for Lent. We need no calendar.
The ocean of forgiveness awaits, for ourselves and for others, but it’s not accessible to any of us except through the door of repentance. Easter is always preceded by Lent.