8:45am | On Saturday I will be attending a memorial service, for better and for worse.
The bad is obvious: someone will be missing, someone who will be very much in mind. And to whatever extent such an event can be a celebration of this missing soul who touched us, the implacable sadness of it all is the collective acknowledgement that he really is gone, that this is the way our lives are now: bereft of one of our lights.
The good is obvious, too. It is no simple accident of history that the word community is etymologically related to commune — not only the noun, which bears some synonymous relation, but also the verb, “to commune”: to speak confidentially and intimately, to be in close touch.
These words are rooted in the Latin communis: common, public, shared. That which is common to us, that which we have in common. When we commune with one another, we share ourselves, our joys and griefs. By putting ourselves in touch with our fellows, we distribute both our gifts of happiness and our burdens of sadness; those with whom we commune help us carry what is more than we alone can bear. We are richer for sharing our bounty, and less burdened by distributing the weight of our misfortune.
Earlier this month I had the privilege to review a fine production of A Christmas Carol. It’s a story whose basic premise we all know so well we might easily (mis)take its messages for granted. One of those is its conception of other people as our “fellow-passengers to the grave.” It’s a beautiful image, harrowingly sad and yet raising us above our individual march toward, if not oblivion, at least out of our native state and into an undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. Much as we’re all passengers on Spaceship Earth as it revolves around the sun in a spiraling arm of a galaxy pinwheeling across the cosmos, we’re all on the same implacable pilgrimage forward in time, the same eventual emigration from this life.
“Do you realize,” the Flaming Lips sing, “that everyone you know someday will die?” A sad, inevitable prospect with solace in the present, among our fellow-passengers. So instead of saying all of your goodbyes, commune whenever you can. Because you don’t need a quartet of ghosts — nor Christmastime, nor the death of a loved one — to tell you that humankind is your business, and that our time in common is finite. And do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?
On Saturday I will have the good fortune to commune, even though the circumstances are unfortunate. A light in the darkness.
We live by that light. Or we should.