07/04/2025
Do you know "King Lear?" Do you know the part where the Earl of Gloucester has his eyes gouged out by his enemy and he is abandoned and betrayed by everyone? Do you know the part where he is rescued by the son he, himself, has betrayed and banished? Do you remember how, typical of Shakespeare, that son is in disguise? Do you know the part where that son, still true, guides his father to the cliff's edge because his dad wants to leap from it and die? Do you know the part where Gloucester jumps? Do you know the part where it's not a cliff at all, and the father lands with his feet on flat ground because his son still loves him so? If you do, then you are ready for this poem that I just read for the first time today:
I think of Gloucester, blind, led through the world
To the world’s edge by the hand of a stranger
Who is his faithful son. At the cliff’s verge
He flings away his life, as of no worth,
The true way lost, his eyes two bleeding wounds—
And finds his life again, and is led on
By the forsaken son who has become
His father, that the good may recognize
Each other, and at last go ripe to death.
We live the given life, and not the planned.
--Wendell Berry (A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997)
We live the given life, and not the planned.
Amen
