Crying Glory Bloodied Though We Be: Gratitude in Hard Times

Last night’s Circle was very ‘heavy’. You feel it, too, don’t you?

I actually canceled the event the day before. I have been hosting Women’s Circles for almost three years every two weeks, and this was the first time that I canceled one. THAT is how challenging of a week I had.

I spent a large majority of the day before crying and complaining to God, ‘why?’ Why can’t I fix things in my life? Really? ‘This’ is still happening to me. I am just so very tired.

I felt like I was going to die.

And then after spending a very difficult day, it occurred to me:

No. I don’t think so. Not yet. I’ve got things to do.

And I picked myself up, and I reposted the Circle Event, and we held it.

And as I was getting ready for the Circle, a quote popped into my head. The quote was sent to me almost twenty years ago from a friend of mine. When I was living with my first husband on an Airforce base in Columbus, Mississippi, I stopped into a bookstore and met Theron McGregor: this older gentleman sitting alone behind a table with a stack of his books Tall Cotton. So I bought one, read it and then became friends with this man Theron.

His autobiographical book is filled with the unbelievable racism, poverty and hardship that he grew up in. The things he spoke of were so bleak and unfair and horrible, but amidst that, his character was this little light of … hope and love.

Long story short, we stayed friends, and after my husband got out of the military, and we had moved to California, his wife called me one day to tell me that he had died suddenly of a heart attack.

Two days later, I got a letter from him in the mail that he had sent prior to having the heart attack. And in that letter was a sermon from a Unitarian church with this quote:

And what is required of us? It is to yield to our many births and open our newborn eyes to what is given, and cry “Glory!” bloodied though we be, and to say thank you in the end. Just that – to take a bow, a deep bow, before the river and the sky and the meteorite and Equatorius, and yes, even each other. That’s what matters. And if God has a face, God will smile.

Rev. Burton Carley
First Unitarian Church
Memphis, Tenn
Received in the mail from Theron
two days after he passed away.

And here I am, almost twenty years later, and that quote still applies so aptly.

Crying ‘Glory!’ bloodied though we be …