Though My Sadness is Unbounded

A Thanksgiving meditation

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Here in Michigan, mid-autumn winter is its own season. I happened to be visiting my parents when it first announced itself earlier this month. Several inches of snow accumulated overnight. The following morning was magical—intensely blue sky, sculpted white trees with a fluffy thickness you don’t get deeper in the season when all their leaves are shed. Then the sun set to work melting the snow off like a premonition of spring thaw. Occasional bursts of wind sent it swirling down in a shimmery cascade. Of course I took pictures, and my socials quickly populated with similar images from fellow like-minded Midwesterners.

Then as quickly as winter had come, it was gone. But it’s back now, just in time for Thanksgiving. I slipped home before the storm hit, but already I could feel the high winds trying to push my little car around. Tonight, I looked out the window and saw the fresh accumulation, crossed by the long shivering shadow of a tree on the edge of our property.

I have much to be thankful for this year. In offline world, I was offered the best-paying work I’ve ever had as a freelance writer, which unfortunately meant I had less time to update this space, though I’ve still managed to gain readers here. (I look forward to talking a little more about that project when it’s closer to completion.) Several other media and writing opportunities have come my way, including a couple I didn’t see coming at all. And so I continue, impossibly, to piece together a living doing what I’m best at and love most. As the song says, why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come?

A friend of mine was once describing someone he knew as a man who didn’t have a melancholy bone in his body. Then he paused and said, “I have a few melancholy bones in my body.” I knew what he meant.

Last year, I had a Thanksgiving poem accepted by a small magazine in New Orleans called Joie de Vivre, not quite in time to make their print issue for the holiday, but they’ve made good on their promise to come back for it this year. I don’t have it in my hands yet, otherwise I’d snap a picture of how they laid it out with some original artwork. It’s a beautifully edited magazine, and you can grab the new issue here. I called the poem “Prayer of Thanksgiving,” which is a small nod to my Anglican roots. I thought I’d feature it today, then offer a few notes. It goes like this:

Let me not waste the days You’ve given me.
The mornings I might sleep away, the nights
When all my fears are all that I can see,
Trapped in the glow of flickering blue lights.
Revive me. Let me taste that You are good
In fruit arranged to catch the slanting sun,
In green glass shadows spilling over wood,
In snow aflame with gold when day is done.
My flesh is weak, but let my heart be strong.
Let me receive the feast Your grace has founded
With thankfulness. Now let me sing a song
Of gladness, though my sadness is unbounded.
Let me believe that this, my grateful prayer
Is not in vain. Lord, let me not despair.

I’m never sure how much is too much to say about a poem, especially one of your own. This piece is fairly self-explanatory, but it might be somewhat illuminating to explain that I’ve struggled with screen addiction for many years—already a problem in my college days, but all the worse now that I have the “I’m working” excuse. And even when I’m supposed to be working, more often than I care to admit I’m really just scrolling. I wrote an essay about this a few years ago and wish I could say I’ve made a great improvement since then. Many factors are at work in my case, but under it all is that melancholy I share with my friend. I like to think that in some sense it’s a gift, but it’s one of those gifts you’d sometimes like to return to sender.

Shadows of all shapes and sizes have fallen over my home town this year. I call up the faces of people I knew and grew up with, and it seems every other family is reeling from some crushing blow. It’s difficult in such times not to slip into a kind of fatalism, a sense of some infernally inevitable dues collection. God knows the future, but so too does His patient enemy.

As a Christian, one is supposed to turn to God in such times, and so one does, often. But it is God’s beauty refracted through tangible stuff of earth that brings me the most immediate comfort. In my poem, I allude to my annual photography experiments with our Thanksgiving centerpiece, hoping for sunshine so I can set up a sparkling juice bottle just so. Our family established the tradition of collecting fallen leaves earlier in the season, pressing them between tissues in our outdated World Book Encyclopedia set, then carefully pulling them out to make an autumnal bed for some fruit in a crystal dish. There’s something stabilizing about this kind of beauty for me. When so much is sad, when so much is lost, at least the trees are here. The books are here. The fruit is here.

The Communion hymn “Deck Thyself, My Soul, With Gladness” was rotated a lot in my tiny Anglo-Catholic church growing up. We sang it out of the 1940 hymnal, inherited from the Episcopal church, which our small denomination had spun off from (church history nerds are encouraged to look this up, it was a whole thing). You can hear me sing an acapella version with myself here. The first stanza is obviously percolating behind my poem:

Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness,
leave the gloomy haunts of sadness,
come into the daylight’s splendor;
there with joy thy praises render
unto him whose grace unbounded
hath this wondrous banquet founded;
high o’er all the heavens he reigneth,
yet to dwell with thee he deigneth.

The “banquet” here refers to the Communion feast of bread and wine. Jesus knew what he was doing when he told us to remember him this way. He knew how difficult it can be to “taste and see,” as the psalmist urges. And so he places himself in our hands, on our tongues.

In my poem, it is my sadness that is unbounded. In the hymn, it is His grace. Surely, it will always follow me.