Chalices

Chalices

The places of the past,

are like chalices,

To pour the blood

of lives that left us.

We drink deeply and

taste their death 

with one wild prayer,

to taste the Life

that holds them,

and us together

forever. 

Only a few years ago, I went to a fall seminar in western North Carolina. I arrived to find that the conference had been cancelled, and I just never got the word. I turned the experience into a good one by getting a motel room and traveling around some very familiar places -- which I had not seen for some time. 


Our family had vacationed there for several summers.  I went back to the cottage and just sat on the porch.  I imagined the family darting over the hillside, scavenging for raspberries and avoiding the snakes.  in the fall season of dying, I knew that I had entered the world of memory and the past. I saw faces of people I have loved but see no more. It was like a chalice for me, however, inasmuch as I experience communion as the Life of Jesus in which everything holds together.