The poet Robert Frost once described his initial joy in making a poem as “The surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”

In his poem, “Directive,” Frost describes a grief that is enormous and incomprehensible. It tells of how the carefully built structures of order and meaning give way to the indifferent natural laws of death, erosion, and decay.

Frost pens, 

The height of the adventure is the height

Of country where two village cultures faded

Into each other. Both of them are lost.

And if you’re lost enough to find yourself

By now, pull in your ladder road behind you

And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.

Then make yourself at home. The only field

Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.

The poem speaks of things lost. The impossibility of relief. I know some of you are encountering enormous and incomprehensible grief. I know others who are experiencing a world where structure has fallen away.

It is safe to say that we often feel lost in this new landscape.

But all is not lost! Frost reminds us, at the end of the poem,  that we are not wholly alone, even though we are not whole. And tells us:

Here are your waters and your watering place.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

People of God, we are not wholly alone, even during these times when we cannot gather wholly together. We are a people of God who have been given the waters of baptism to remind us that we have all been claimed together as children of God. In that promise we are given new life. A place to refresh our souls.

We have also been offered the cup of blessing from which we can drink. We are reminded in 1 Corinthians 10:16, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not sharing in the body of Christ? 

Here, people of God, do we find our thirst quenched. In the promise of our Risen Christ with us, in the proclamation that “He is risen, he is risen, indeed!” We drink again, are made whole again, beyond the confusion of the present day.

Prayer:

Gracious God, in the blessings of baptism, you bring us to our watering places of hope and healing. In the offer of communion, we share with you, again, full communion with you. Bless us, gracious God to feel your spirit rest upon us. Ease our confusion, our grief, our worries so that we may drink from your cup of hope. Amen