Dear Popescu (continued)

—another epistle to a lost brother

Ah! And now this poem! this poem daring to observe the commemoration of your beloved grandmother’s death! Both a celebration and a sadness—a bright sadness, as we so often say of Lent, of our Holy Week. We, too, similarly commemorate our beloved departed, albeit with somewhat less comedic innovation. Your grandfather also clearly understood well the need to bear both joy and pain together. They—joy and pain—are often oddly one. I am comforted to witness that you also know how poignant and moving an honest jest can be, how revealing such a gesture can prove regarding those matters one can never successfully address directly, certainly not in earnest. Jesus appears to have enjoyed something of the same disposition in the spinning of his own parabolic observations, I think—the somewhat negligent sower of seeds, the lit lamp beneath the bowl, the overachieving mustard seed, the weeds mixing in with wheat, etc.

Do you suppose our Lord was ever earnest as he offered these fraught parables to what was so often a manifestly dim-witted crowd? Still, we are told that—following some many hours of prayer in the garden—he suddenly chose to pray “more earnestly,” but that was an uncommon moment, no? Unique. And profoundly solitary, so how could anyone else—even our famously astute Saint Luke—know of so internal, so hidden a shift? The Gospels seem so often to offer for our view something of a guess—a very good guess, no doubt, but a guess. I think that many of our scriptures are comprised of authorial overstepping, fictive embroidering of the variously opaque words and actions the author has observed, or has simply heard about. Regardless, safe to say that this dire moment in the garden did not manifest—even to those lying fast asleep in the olive grove—the Lord’s habitual, light touch.

I am pleased, brother, by your light touch, revealing as it does a quiet confidence that, despite the acute ache of a given moment, all will be well.

*