We Can Love Completely What We Cannot

Each One Of Us Here Today Will At One Time In Our Lives Look Upon A Loved One Who Is In Need And Ask The Same Question: We Are Willing To Help, Lord, But What, If Anything, Is Needed? For It Is True We Can Seldom Help Those Closest To Us. Either We Don't Know What Part Of Ourselves To Give Or, More Often Than Not, The Part We Have To Give Is Not Wanted. And So It Is Those We Live With And Should Know Who Elude Us. But We Can Still Love Them - We Can Love Completely Without Complete Understanding.

I Had As Yet No Notion That Life Every Now And Then Becomes Literature—not For Long, Of Course, But Long Enough To Be What We Best Remember, And Often Enough So That What We Eventually Come To Mean By Life Are Those Moments When Life, Instead Of Going Sideways, Backwards, Forward, Or Nowhere At All, Lines Out Straight, Tense And Inevitable, With A Complication, Climax, And, Given Some Luck, A Purgation, As If Life Had Been Made And Not Happened.

Now Nearly All Those I Loved And Did Not Understand When I Was Young Are Dead, But I Still Reach Out To Them.

So It Is That We Can Seldom Help Anybody. Either We Don't Know What Part To Give Or Maybe We Don't Like To Give Any Part Of Ourselves. Then, More Often Than Not, The Part That Is Needed Is Not Wanted. And Even More Often, We Do Not Have The Part That Is Needed.

We Sat On The Bank And The River Went By. As Always, It Was Making Sounds To Itself, And Now It Made Sounds To Us. It Would Be Hard To Find Three Men Sitting Side By Side Who Knew Better What A River Was Saying.