The other night, as I
was driving back from a girls night out, I hit a rabbit.
Bushy white tail and big
bright eyes bounced out in front of the car. It took half a horrible
second for me to realize that there was not enough time for him to hop out of
the way. Time stopped.
The front tire bumped
against a little body. I screamed. Then the back right tire finished the job. For the length of three
blocks, I debated going back to see if fatal damage had been done. That
final jolt against the back right tire had already answered my question.
He was gone.
Ultimately, my Wednesday
night was a more-or-less dramatic but nonetheless real encounter with the end
times.
Life is fragile.
Sometimes, I feel echoey
inside. You know: the days when you feel like you're so hollow that
everybody's looks and comments and thoughts could land inside you, like a
marble bouncing inside a glass bowl and glancing off the edges. As the
marble hits the glass, it rings sharply, vibrating painfully, making a sound
that hurts your ears.
Jarring.
Part of being a person
means having an inner space that can sometimes jar and hurt. In Love
and Responsibility, Wojtyla describes a person as "an objective
entity, which as a definite subject has the closest contacts with the whole
(external) world and is most intimately involved with it precisely because of
its inwardness, its interior life." (1)
People have an inner
world, a sacred space. Human beings experience the world in terms of and
through this interior world. People are sacred.
Now that we all know
this truth about each other, what is next? You can know that an inner
world exists beyond your reach behind the eyes of another person, but knowing
that world exists does not make you able to reach that world. It remains
right beyond reach.
What is left?
Tenderness.
Wojtyla writes that
tenderness "springs from awareness of the inner state of another person
(and indirectly of that person's external situation, which conditions his inner
state) and whoever feels it actively seeks to communicate his feeling of close
involvement with the other person and his situation." (2)
Actively communicating
awareness of another person's internal and external situation leads to what
Wojtyla will call active displays of tenderness.
This is not a ploy for
people to bring me coffee. I promise. (On the other hand, I will
not reject displays of tenderness that result in coffee). (On the other
hand again, these are the words of a senior who is coming to understand the
truth about real poverty: no money, no coffee, no sleep. Not necessarily
in that order. St. Francis got nothing on me.)
A quote I discovered
from “House of Incest”, a book I have yet to read, speaks to the fragility of
human life and our ability to be tender to each other:
"What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble." (4)
"What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble." (4)
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Evelyn HildebrandI love people - it fascinates me that it's impossible to really completely know another person. There's always uncharted territory. I love the ocean - the power that pulls you into a rising wave, the clean, clear curve, the pounding crash when the bubbly crest of a wave hits you feet as you dive straight through. I love paint - on canvas. On mason jars. On newspaper. On my hands.
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(2) Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 202.
(3) Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 202.
(4) House of Incest, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/fragile.
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