It played again today as offering hymn. I recognized in the opening notes, lived again association and memory.
My daughter sat beside, my arm around her shoulder, as we listen and I saw her searching for the memory—association to song and sound eluding whole of understanding.
“How do I know this song?” she asked.
“It’s the song we walked down to as a family at Pepe’s funeral,” I answered, “…and the one we were crying to on Father’s Day when it played.”
Light takes in her eye at recognition and remembrance. Different than before—she smiles.
Unchanging the past, she is healed in present having found and in hold of a something that isn’t sadness, a something more.
Maybe that’s reason and gift, as well, of Mass—time and process of healing and grace that reconciles until the reasons we hurt, the reasons we’re sad, no longer are and all that’s left is love: a kind that can’t be lost, one transcendent of every pain.
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“So sings my soul, my savior God to thee! How great thou art, how great thou art!”