The Treasure That Couldn’t Be Kept

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
  with your one wild and precious life?"

--Mary Oliver, from "The Summer Day"

It is also a humble opportunity to serve our struggling liberal religious cousins in Romania by working on the guest house which our Partner Church is constructing on church property in Ujszekely in the hope of making a little income off the growing tourist industry in Transylvania. That project is now nearing completion, but in many ways our partnership, and the friendships it creates and nourishes, is really just beginning, and that is the real reason that we are there.

Each time I return to Transylvania I am made more aware of the treasure that that partnership, and those friendships, are. Once the immediate recollection of the difficulty and discomfort of getting there and back have begun to fade (try fourteen hours overnight in a cramped bus with techno-pop music blaring the entire way), I am left with the warm glow of memories of people and places that I never expected to know or to see and with the realization of the wonderful gift that this partnership has given me and those who have traveled there.

Alas, those days of work and companionship and conviviality in Ujszekely passed too quickly, and it seems no sooner had we arrived than it was time to go. Other than in memory, they cannot be held, but the trick is to live such times in the moments as they are passing. Carpe diem, said the ancients, "live for today," and they knew whereof they spoke. Or as the ancient poet Kalidasa reminded us in our opening words, "Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life!"

Later I and my good traveling companion journeyed on by train through the Austrian and Swiss Alps to Germany, where I am building other new friendships, and the days passed much too quickly there, as well.

There was the glorious day when we ascended into the magnificent traceried tower of the Freiburg Minster, certainly one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe; or the evening when we ate dinner in a restaurant high in the Black Forest hills above the city of Freiburg; or the day we visited the lovely city of Basel, Switzerland and its wonderful old cathedral, which incorporates some of the most beautiful stone carving I have ever seen. As John is fond of saying, after visiting these wonderful and moving religious structures, one is ready to sign on the bottom line of almost any belief or any practice!

These times passed too quickly, I say, as they always do, and I soon found myself back in the States attending a family reunion of Sabrina’s family in Sullivan, Maine, where for the first time all the children of Sabrina and her six brothers and sisters were together in one place at the same time. Photographs captured many of the events of that memorable week, and will be looked at nostalgically in the months and years to come, but those days together with our children passed much, much too quickly.

Life, as John Lennon once famously said, is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans.

My recollection was that at the time Sabrina and I sold our house in Maine, in 1999, my son Josh remarked that it was "the treasure that couldn’t be kept." That house was the culmination of many dreams, much hard labor, and a mid-life crisis that had taken me temporarily out of the ministry and back home to my native state of Maine. When it finally came time to let it go, it was very difficult for all of us.

But when I thought back on it this week, I realized that Josh had actually made his observation about the house at the time we left Maine in 1995 to move here to Newburyport. He was about to enter the fourth grade. Out of the mouth of babes!

I began to think of the many ways in which his words are true. They have the ring of a fairy tale title, and as we all know, fairy tales, though fictional, contain lessons and truths about real life; but as far as I know there is no fairy tale entitled "the treasure that couldn’t be kept." With the exception perhaps of within our memories, most of the most important things in life cannot be kept, and as folk wisdom reminds us, the rest cannot be taken with us. It turns out we are mostly borrowers in this life.

Of course our beautiful house in Maine was a treasure that couldn’t be kept, and not just because we couldn’t afford to own two houses. It was also, I now believe, because there was more for us to do and to be and to experience in this life. Not just our finances: the timing wasn’t right for us to keep that house. Partly it was that the house was built on dreams which turned out to be better in anticipation than in reality (and how often in life does that turn out to be true?) But the lesson from its loss endures: the real treasures in life, as Josh recognized, can never be kept.

That mile-high day in the "Transylvanian Alps" when we watched shepherds milking their sheep as they have probably done for hundreds of years in the Carpathian Mountains. That climb up the Precipice trail on Mt. Desert Island, cousins in tow, on a downeast-Maine day to die for. That evening up in the Black Forest with our delightful young German friends Franz and Claudia, sharing good food and wine. Budapest on the Danube on yet another glorious, bright blue summer day, with our good friend and translator Denes Jakab and his lovely companion Aranka Kiss. Summer itself, which, while we trust from experience it will return next year, will never be quite the same as this year’s, or last year’s, and certainly never as good as that summer when we were nine or ten. Summer, too, is a treasure that can never be kept.

Some of you know that I am a connoisseur of old cemeteries, and recently I had the opportunity, on a beautiful late August Sunday morning (in lieu of church), to visit the grave of the poet Robert Frost in Bennington, VT. It was another of those little pilgrimages of which I am so fond, and it didn’t disappoint. Frost’s epitaph, I discovered, is a line from one of his poems: "I had a lover’s quarrel with the world." I realized that I do, too. It makes you ponder.

If you are not convinced yet of the transience of all things, just take a walk in the cemetery. Here lies the poet who in life wrote that he had "miles to go before I sleep." And repeated it for good measure. And now he sleeps.

And all the other sweet and loving souls who have ever trod on this self-same earth, "both the known and the unknown, the remembered and the forgotten," now lying in the dust with him. All that we love and have loved and will love will eventually join him, including ourselves. Is it any wonder that the poet Mary Oliver, remembering another lovely summer day, must inquire of us, with urgency, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

"Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life!" It is a once-only day of your life, and of mine. It will never come again. How do we live in mindfulness of this reality? How do we make ourselves truly present for all the incredible moments of our days?

Maybe we can’t. But we can constantly remind ourselves to be more aware; to wake up, as Thoreau counseled, with an ever new and "infinite" expectation of the dawn; to recognize in the fleeting moment the reality that this is all there is, right here, right now, and that the rest is purely speculation, with no guarantee. Life is the treasure above all others that cannot be kept, and until we accept that fact, difficult thought it may be to do so, we can never really learn to live and to appreciate all the other little treasures in our lives. Everything and everyone we love will pass away, but we have this present moment when all that was, and is, and shall be are eternally present to us.

Perhaps, despite our deepest yearnings, it was never meant to be kept in the first place. For if it were possible to keep it forever, it would become meaningless. It is because it cannot be kept that it is precious.

Let us then live in the beauty of this never-to-be-repeated day, a day of our lives. It is just a day: but, oh, what a day! I am grateful for a small boy’s wisdom in reminding me about its impermanence, and making me think about where my real treasures lie. As we begin this journey of a new church year together, let us try to remember, and appreciate, and savor all our days, filling them with love and the joy of life. It is good to be together! Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock