Surprised by advance grief ...

Today over coffee someone showed concern for a person I love and emotion welled in me. My watering eyes and suddenly uncontrolled emotions told me something about how deeply fragile and vulnerable life is. Perhaps I was also surprised by how much I love, how deeply I care. Despite living in France I am not all that easy about showing deep emotion - my buttoned up British upbringing is still part of me. Great at empathy except for those I care most for!
I avoid seeing how quickly life is flying by. Not having children in part encourages that - there are no people in our daily lives growing up and learning from us, challenging us, wanting and expecting us to go on living.
Perhaps awarenes of the fragility of life is also a way of countering the shallowness of much of my daily life. So tonight I celebrate the fragility of life and my brief understanding of it today, perhaps I will also begin to understand more fully that passion is also personal and not only political. And perhaps also see and be with my own vulnerability and not always try to overcome it.
In one of Janet Morley's eucharistic prayers the sanctus begins "holy, holy, holy vulnerable God ..." I like that. Allowing myself to experience my own emotional and physical vulnerability - and to care about the real vulnerability of those I love - may just mean I begin to glimpse deeper understanding of the God I proclaim, the God who did not disdain vulnerability in any way.