No one is not loved
"There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart…"
Marilynne Robinson
I finished Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" last night. It is a 750 page tome about the life and political genius of Abraham Lincoln. Among the many things that I was impacted by, I felt joy and grief reading about Lincoln's four sons, only one of which lived to adulthood. One boy, Eddie, died at 3 from tuberculosis. Willie and Tad, his brothers, were full of laughter and life, sensitive, playful, kind. Willie died from scarlet fever at age 11, and Tad had a much lonelier childhood thereafter. Tad went on to lose his father at age 12, and he died unexpectedly for obscure medical reasons at the age of 18.
Despite a gap of a century and a half, I found myself wanting to meet these little boys and spend an hour with them. But they are gone, completely and irretrievably lost to me. Not only them, but everyone who ever knew them-- and everyone who ever knew them. I feel strangely like I have deeply missed out, like something wonderful and precious has been lost to me. What we can reconstruct of even those we knew intimately and loved is the faintest whisper compared to the power and vitality of their lived presence. There's so little to hold onto about anyone. If this is so even with those faces we have touched and held, how can we possibly hold onto the past at all in any meaningful sense?
Willie and Tad were just two little boys. It's estimated that the total human population, now and past, is over 100 billion people. Each one with a name, a smile, a story. There are so many precious people I will never meet, let alone know about. We are mutually lost to eachother across reaches of time and space. "Not people die, but worlds in them." The grief and loss of this is immense. Reflecting on that this morning, I wept. I held my wife this morning and told her I was grateful that I get to be one of the very few people who will ever get to know her- her playfulness, her vitality, her gentleness. I get the privilege, shared by so few humans who will ever exist, to see her smile and hear her laugh, to sit with her in the morning sun for a moment.
Yet, we who have cast our lives onto Jesus have an unyielding hope, a lifeline in the torrent of compounding loss and chaos. Jesus is profoundly familiar with each story, each moment is the present to him, and history itself is vivid and alive to Him. No single person has ever or will ever escape his intimate knowing and tender love-- "no one is not loved." In the shade of Jesus' titanic victory over death, may we all one day find one another.