CL Meditations: "I Have Loved Life"

This is my first episode in a new Craft of Living category that I am provisionally naming CL Meditations. In distinction to the Bites recordings, here I will offer more reflective pieces, often with a more spiritual undertone. Today I am sharing a section from Christian Wiman's book My Bright Abyss where he unpacks the significance of Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.”

Here is Wiman's quote:

The last words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet and priest who died of typhoid at the age of forty-five, are striking: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.” How desperately we, the living, want to believe in this possibility: that death could be filled with promise, that the pain of leaving and separation could be, if not a foretaste of joy, then at least not meaningless. Forget religion. Even atheists want to die well, or want those they love to die well, which has to mean more than simply a quiet resignation to complete annihilation. That is merely a polite nihilism. No, to die well, even for the religious, is to accept not only our own terror and sadness but the terrible holes we leave in the lives of others; at the same time, to die well, even for the atheist, is to believe that there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible. I don’t mean by survival merely persisting in the memory of others. I mean something deeper and more durable. If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication—even as, maybe even especially as, our atoms begin the long dispersal we call death.
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