21 February 2021

Here we are at the end of our days together. How can that be? I simply blinked! Wasn’t it just this morning I waited for you at the Great Hall door? I watched you descend the windy staircase and felt every ache, every difficulty of these past months leave these old bones. You were – you are – my tonic, living proof that love can pull you out of yesterday.

I’ll admit I’d been worried. The world above seemed to … crack … this year. Its planes shifted; the broken edges rose up, making the way home treacherous and fraught. But you traversed the rough terrain, you arrived. And here Below, in our world, deep and secret and constant, you dared the darkness to follow. You came with light in your hearts, with open arms that folded me in … and I heard it, that voice ringing between us, a voice crystal with joy.

You heard it too. I saw proof of that in your generosity of spirit, each to the other. In the laughter you shared. In the quiet attention you paid to friends in need. In the praise you accorded another’s undertakings, for the encouragement you offered the unsure. You shed your own worries at the door like one might a cloak heavy with rain and turned from them, radiant and ready to give.

The Great Hall hardly needed candles, you all shone so brightly.

Our shared joy is like no other – special, fragile, and in its euphoria we are vulnerable. We are here together only because we believe, but because we believe, we are always together. I take solace in the astonishing gift of our gathering which is made possible only by our parting. 

As T. S. Eliot once said, to make an end is to make a beginning.

It’s a circle, isn’t it, and a beautiful one. 

With love, always,
Father