During her last months of her illness, Rebecca Elson wrote in her notebooks, thinking her way towards whatever meaning her life could be given. Her editors describe how and why she wrote:
"She wrote in pencil, legibly and freely, drafting and redrafting poems, stories and essays. She would tackle a difficult idea again and again to clarify its expression. Among these entries, she developed the habit of making verse notes, a discipline of observing and exploring, written at speed directly into the book. Occasionally she would draw on one of these entries to inform a poem, but most remain as they were first written — fresh, unguarded, illuminated by their own discovery."
The second half of A Responsibility to Awe consists of selections from those notebooks, the last entry written 9 days before she died. Reading them now you become aware of a mind that did not miss much, and yet wasn't gratuitously grasping. Intellectual avarice corrupts the soul of the scientist, and Rebecca Elson demonstrates in her poetry and her science rare gifts of intellectual generosity, of respect for what is, of curiosity that is never mere lust for factual certainties. The notebooks contain humour and wistfulness, regret and playfulness, engaging with existential dilemmas and deconstructing everyday routines.
Here are two brief entries in which the image of stones, – stepping stones in a river and stones placed on a mountain cairn, open in her mind sluices of uncertainty so that her "sureness falters."
Life a la carte, and why not, order it up
Not really understanding anything
just skimping across the surface
Like going upstream on stepping stones
You don't really know the meaning of river.
Cold wet feet, a current against you
You might get there, but you haven't understood.
So many stones
Building a cairn on a mountain top
Where few will go
I lift & place my few stones
And the wind and snow might knock them down
My sureness falters…..
The vulnerability and uncertainty of these lines is deeply moving, written a year before she died. Reading them during Advent invites an acknowledgement that this season of expectation, of hopeful looking forward towards the light, is not within reach of everyone's experience. There are those who feel they have nothing much to look forward to. There are those who, looking into the next few weeks and months, feel that their sureness falters. I've often felt that the great exhortations of Hebrews have a place in the Advent lectionary – "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard becuse of his reverent submission." (Heb. 5.7)
The risk of human birth, the contingency of growing up, the not knowing until incarnation the glory and frailty of human flesh, and yes, those times told in our Gospels when, even for Jesus, perhaps especially for Jesus, sureness falters. I don't see Advent as triumphalist denial of human suffering, but as a call to hopefulness for all of us when, like the Word made flesh, sureness falters. And perhaps the call of God to us this Advent, is to notice those around us who bring their stones to the cairn where wind and snow might knock them down – and to stand there with them as their sureness falters.
The photo used is from the site http://www.rogerwendell.com/hiking.html with thanks for its use.
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