. . . find Strength in what remains behind

One of my favorite poems of all is William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality." I know he was an English Romantic writer who was privileged in every way. In this poem he reflects with nostalgia upon the loss of his childhood and youth, "Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind." I believe, however, that I am more like his contemporary William Blake. Born to the working class in London, he was able to witness the many injustices that children of his country had to endure in nineteeth century England. These astute observations led to the famous poems in his "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." Who can ever forget the chimney sweeper who cries with his lisp, "''weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe?

While surfing the tv channels the other night, I paused momentarily on Joel Osteen's New Year's sermon at his mega church, Lakewood, in Houston. Basically, his message was that we need to move forward and not spend our time searching our pasts and meditating on all our mistakes, missed opportunities, wounds, and hurts from the past. One of my resolutions for 2007 is to take his words seriously and to live for today and the future. I have spent far too much time on the past.

My grandmother, whom we affectionally called Mam, through the years was one who lived for the moment. Her words always were that she had two loves in her life after the death of her second husband, food and tv. In spite of the fact that she had many losses in her life, she was always optimistic about the future. In 1918 she lost her two-year-old son and her first husband to the Spanish flu. She struggled to raise her baby daughter alone for a few years, but then she remarried. She wanted more children, especially a son, not really to replace the loss of James Robert but as a comfort and to give to her new husband who yearned for a son. Her dream was not to be realized, however, when she was rushed to the hospital for a hysterectomy shortly after the marriage.

My mother, on the other hand, worried endlessly about how her life had gone. She divorced my alcoholic father when my sister was nine, and I was five. Even as her life was nearly to a close in 1993, she often spent hours with my sister and me discussing all the alternatives she might have taken in her life.

I resolve this year to join in the work of the world, already in progress somehow without me. I want to " . . . find Strength in what remains behind," but I surely don't want to embrace it for years like my mother did. And, unfortunately, as I have done for too many years.