Elisabeth
The easiest thing to do is numb yourself, Distract yourself, until the ache recedes So deep inside it only hurts when touched (Which isn't often—you make sure of that). But angels don't respect the barriers We build to keep ourselves from being hurt, So when one barged into your quiet life, Enflaming all the ashes of your hopes With his insistence that you'd have a child, Your joy—bright as a diamond—was as sharp As diamonds too, and set to tear your heart In shreds without a moment's notice. Now You stand exposed to pain as well as joy. Such is the bargain. Trembling, you strike hands.
I’ve just finished re-reading a childhood classic (though I didn’t discover it myself until I was grown up), Daddy-Long-Legs. Towards the close of the story, the protagonist, Judy, writes this to the man she loves:
For in spite of being happier than I ever dreamed I could be, I’m also soberer. The fear that something may happen rests like a shadow on my heart. Always before I could be frivolous and care-free and unconcerned, because I had nothing precious to lose. But now—I shall have a Great Big Worry all the rest of my life. Whenever you are away from me I shall be thinking of all the automobiles that can run over you, or the sign-boards that can fall on your head, or the dreadful, squirmy germs that you may be swallowing. My peace of mind is gone for ever—but anyway, I never cared much for just plain peace.
Which is just another way of saying what Lewis famously wrote in The Four Loves, isn’t it? “There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”
I wonder if that is how old Elisabeth felt, in the days when little John the Baptist was growing inside her and, later, when she held him in her arms. So many years of tears and heartache swallowed up in joy, but oh—what a fearful, fragile sort of joy! She would never have unwished the joy, of course. No one who loves would. But the shadow, as Judy puts it, is there.
I spoke a while ago to someone about how I was, in a sense, losing a person I loved and how much it hurt. He reminded me of that poem by Hopkins, “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”. In it, Hopkins writes of how, as we get older, we lose our youthful beauty but that that beauty “is kept with fonder a care,/ Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it”. God, the person I was speaking to was saying, would do the same for the one I loved, would keep that one with a fonder care than I could.
I found that hard to believe at the time (“God doesn’t have a good track record of caring for precious things,” I said). I still find it hard to really truly believe. But since I can’t protect my dearest people, since automobiles and sign-boards and germs and a host of other things are ever-present threats, and since, by letting myself love, I have struck a bargain that I’ll accept the pain it brings, what else can I do but try to trust the scarred hands to hold safe what I can’t?