By Susan Harper
We’ve probably all had the experience of getting a song stuck in our heads. I had a colleague at the library who used to cover her ears whenever “Miss Catherine” played a certain tune as part of her Kidsercise program. “If I hear that song this morning,” my co-worker used to say, fleeing the front desk, hands over hears, elbows sticking out so that she had to run through the door sideways, “I’ll be hearing it all week.”
The good gifts of love
Interestingly (to me), what I’ve had in my head for days now is a prayer. I don’t know what has prompted it, except perhaps the recent loss of my dad. In the aftermath of his death, my head has been full of all sorts of things: memories, torrents of dreams, discoveries of things I’d forgotten I knew, and now this simple prayer, which our minister used to say every Sunday morning when the ushers returned the offertory plates to the altar.
“For every good gift of thy love, O God, make us truly grateful. Bless now the gifts which we bring unto thee, and the givers.” As often as I heard those words, they were always new, and they still are. In this season of giving and receiving, the buying of presents and sending of cards, I see reminders everywhere of my great good fortune.
It is surely impossible to count every good gift; sometimes it seems that my life has been one long shower of blessings — and so many of them have come from (or through) my dad. Sometimes, too, it astonishes me what counts as a blessing. Memories of occasions that weren’t funny or happy at the time are now a-glow with a meaning I couldn’t fully appreciate back then. Once in childhood I did something thoughtless that hurt my mother’s feelings, and my dad responded with the strongest anger I’d ever seen in him. It startled and even scared me.
Now, as I sit with her by the Christmas tree, and she says that Dad would not have wanted us to be so sad at Christmas that we couldn’t enjoy it, the memory of his anger returns transformed, and what I see is his love for her, and his desire to protect her from all the hurt in the world.
He tried to protect all of us. When my marriage fell apart, when I was diagnosed with hepatitis, there was my father on the doorstep, from hundreds or thousands of miles away, as fast has he could get there, to see what I needed and be sure I was okay. This protective impulse extended beyond his immediate family to all those he was connected to. When his aunt broke her hip, he looked after her for the next 25 years. Think of that!
And I do think of that. It’s been one of his gifts to us: the gift of his example. These days I seem to be stubbing my toe on his gifts every which way I turn. The stars in the winter sky, the beauty of the music of Christmas — my enthusiastic joy in God’s gifts to the world is one of my dad’s many gifts to me. Perhaps the prayer in my head was sent or summoned to help me remember all of this and to create and sustain, in me, a profound gratitude for every good gift, not just under the tree, but in my heart.
Susan Harper is the former director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce. This column originally appeared in the Dec. 16 edition of The Commerce News
“For every good gift of thy love, O God, make us truly grateful. Bless now the gifts which we bring unto thee, and the givers.” As often as I heard those words, they were always new, and they still are. In this season of giving and receiving, the buying of presents and sending of cards, I see reminders everywhere of my great good fortune.
It is surely impossible to count every good gift; sometimes it seems that my life has been one long shower of blessings — and so many of them have come from (or through) my dad. Sometimes, too, it astonishes me what counts as a blessing. Memories of occasions that weren’t funny or happy at the time are now a-glow with a meaning I couldn’t fully appreciate back then. Once in childhood I did something thoughtless that hurt my mother’s feelings, and my dad responded with the strongest anger I’d ever seen in him. It startled and even scared me.
Now, as I sit with her by the Christmas tree, and she says that Dad would not have wanted us to be so sad at Christmas that we couldn’t enjoy it, the memory of his anger returns transformed, and what I see is his love for her, and his desire to protect her from all the hurt in the world.
He tried to protect all of us. When my marriage fell apart, when I was diagnosed with hepatitis, there was my father on the doorstep, from hundreds or thousands of miles away, as fast has he could get there, to see what I needed and be sure I was okay. This protective impulse extended beyond his immediate family to all those he was connected to. When his aunt broke her hip, he looked after her for the next 25 years. Think of that!
And I do think of that. It’s been one of his gifts to us: the gift of his example. These days I seem to be stubbing my toe on his gifts every which way I turn. The stars in the winter sky, the beauty of the music of Christmas — my enthusiastic joy in God’s gifts to the world is one of my dad’s many gifts to me. Perhaps the prayer in my head was sent or summoned to help me remember all of this and to create and sustain, in me, a profound gratitude for every good gift, not just under the tree, but in my heart.
Susan Harper is the former director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce. This column originally appeared in the Dec. 16 edition of The Commerce News
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