I looked down to read. When I looked up, the sun had slipped away leaving shadows dying beneath the coiled hose, the empty chair, the quiet oak.

   We are brides of the sea. We are husbands of the air. We are married to the earth that loves us, nurtures us and also holds us captive until our end.

   Our bodies are stronger than we think and more fragile than we assume when we wake on a given morning, full of energy, into a day certain to be uncertain.

   Some morning, as neuro-intensive care nurse Deadre Hall reminds us, our strength may be cut by a sudden blow we receive here on mother earth:

   “Maybe we start our day thinking everything is fine but we don’t know," she says. "We have some terrible accident or a stroke and suddenly we can’t move. That’s what I’m here for. To look after people who’ve been struck down.”

   Thank God for caregivers like Deadre. We may not give them a moment's thought until suddenly we live desperate for her healing touch. We need Deadre's hands and the wholeness of her heart.

   Caregivers we never knew may abruptly become our link to a world that has changed for us. For our consciousness has been jarred into another place.

   "I suppose most of us will kiss/ a terrible scar to prove we can live with it," poet Stephen Dunn writes.

   But, that is not so for all of us. We may choose to hide our scars because they are far too painful to embrace.

   In his shattering book, The Best Day the Worst Day, Donald Hall describes his life and final days with his wife, the great poet Jane Kenyon, who died at age forty-seven of leukemia. "Crushed together into one room and one fact, we began the new routiness that became our lives," he writes.

   Gifted messengers of Beauty, these two souls had felt their spirits soaring until the moment a doctor told Jane: "You have leukemia." Married to the earth, as are we all, they suddenly felt their world quake.

   What salvation may we find as we struggle to hold onto our marriage with life? When life turns hellish, we may want to give up all together.

   Whatever choice we select, the only comfort can be Love. Vocatus at que non vocatus deus ad erit. Called or not called, God is present.

   "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may," Shakespeare wrote to us over four centuries ago. Yet we can only seek to hew them thinking, right or wrong, that we can make our journey safe, that our worst scars may be healed with kisses, that we shall remain whole.

   When we turn away from God, life becomes darkness. When we welcome Love, our marriage to the earth is sealed with eternal peace.

-Reverend Erie Chapman