This weekend I noticed two outstanding pieces of writing.  Theologian Ben Myers’ As I Sit Dying is a spellbinding little narrative, quite funny in bits (for example, when he reveals that if he keeps up the way he’s been going, he probably won’t live more than another 50 years.)  Here’s a snippet:

No, death and dying notwithstanding, I guess all I’d really like to say is that I’m glad to have been alive. That alive is a very good thing to be, and I have not a single word to say against it. That I have loved songs and food and drink and night time and the way friends’ voices sound around a campfire in the dead of night. That I have loved animals, especially dogs and cats, and if I had ever got to know horses properly I would have loved them too. That I have seen whales, have witnessed their rolling bigness, and have loved them very much. That I have loved books and reading, have loved re-reading certain books and remembering what it was like to read them for the first time. That I have loved the faces of my friends (I hope somebody will remember those faces after I’m gone). That I have loved strangers’ faces too, old men and old women and beautiful women whose faces I fell in love with and never forgot even though I only saw them once, across a crowded room or in a train or on a bridge as I walked by. That I have loved my wife’s face and my wife’s words and my wife’s skin and the way my wife thinks when she is happy or when she is sad or when she is tired or first wakes up, wide awake and already hatching plans while I am still trying to dream. That I have loved my –

My children.

As I sit here now, as I sit dying, my heart slowly wearing out inside me, that is all I really want to tell you. I have loved all of it and I don’t have a word to say against it. To tell you the truth, I even love the things that I have hated. Doing wrong, being wronged, this whole miserable business of hurt and misunderstanding and mistakes. I have loved all that because I have loved forgiving and being forgiven. Yes, that’s what I have loved most of all. If I could do it all over again I would make all the same mistakes and let all the same mistakes happen to me too, if it only meant that I could have the chance, just once, to forgive, to be forgiven.

Life is very wonderful, and the meaning of it all is the forgiveness of sins, that’s what I’d like to tell you. I am glad to have learned that. I am glad to have been alive and to have made so many mistakes and to have borne the brunt of so many too. It is wonderful, all of it.

Heather McHugh‘s poem “In Praise of Pain” turns the old maxim “Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good” inside out.  Professor McHugh suggests that the perfect might not be particularly good, certainly not good for us.  Here’s the second of its three short stanzas:

For beauty’s sake, assault and drive and burn
the devil from the simply perfect sun.
Demand a birthmark on the skin of love,
a tremble in the touch, in come a cry,
and let the silverware of nights be flecked,
the moon pocked to distribute more or less
indwelling alloys of its dim and shine
by nip and tuck, by chance’s dance of laws.

The old man loves his old woman, as Erasmus liked to say; he loves her not in spite of the marks of age and approaching mortality that set her apart from her younger self, but because of them, because without them she would not be herself, any more than the girl she used to be would have been herself without the follies and other infirmities of youth.