Not So Simple Gifts

A long time ago, in a career far, far away, I worked at a now defunct book packaging company in Manhattan called Running Heads, its name an arcane reference to the text—generally book title and chapter title—that runs along the top of each page. Book packagers, for those unfamiliar with the trade, generate ideas for books, subcontract the writing and (if included) photographs and illustrations, then sell the production-ready manuscript, or in some cases, finished books, to a publisher who promotes and markets the title as their own. Credit is given to the packager on the copyright page; if you inspect one of your coffee table books, you will likely find a packager mentioned inside. One of the books that came out during my brief tenure as Senior Editor at Running Heads was Simple Gifts: The Shaker Song, which paired the lyrics of the well-known song (’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free) with spare, elegant photographs of Shaker buildings and furniture. Later, I would create a somewhat similar title, The Dance, for which I hand picked a set of all-American images to accompany the Garth Brooks song of the same name. I even managed to include a wedding picture in it from my first (and at the time only) marriage: a shot of my now ex-wife in her Battenberg lace dress, surrounded by her red-velvet clad bridesmaids (we were married in December), smiling brightly as they fawned over her, set to the line, "I might have chanced it all."

I'm not sure if my name is inside Simple Gifts, but I am sure I did not understand then the nature of gifts, perceiving them as talents bestowed on some and not on others, having grown up hearing what a gifted child I was. I had no idea my gifts were meant for anything other than academic achievement, the furthering of self and advancement in the world. I did sense that my gift for writing held rewards greater than my grades—the joy of creating and the satisfaction of generating original work—but these took a distant second to the ego boost of receiving praise. My gifts were something I was fortunate to have, not something that (as I am now cognizant) carried with them an obligation, a commandment to give. To some degree, this distinction develops naturally as we move from child to adult, but suffering loss—particularly heartbreak—and finding the capacity for mature compassion—are instrumental in redefining our understanding of gifts and giving.

The full lyrics of the Shaker song (included below) celebrate the joy—and relief—of submitting to our gifts and of accepting the ultimate gift of God's grace. When we reach the point of knowing that gifts are not something we simply receive but something divinely given and ordained for good, "true simplicity is gain'd" in the form of clarity, the coming together of mission and purpose. At the same time, we assume the burden and shoulder the delicious weight of putting our gifts to consistent use, of devoting (and yes, I mean in the spiritual sense) ourselves to sharing.

What happens when we ignore the knowledge (which frequently comes in the form of feeling) that we have been given a gift intended for others, when we try, with excuses, to avoid the call? To pretend we didn't hear? When this happens, we squander providence. We forgo opportunities, allow windows to close, let sliding door moments slide by un-seized. And these acts of omission have an impact on the shape of the world, the configuring and reconfiguring of paths and their associated outcomes. When we fail to act, we do nothing less than shift the balance between fate and destiny, both for others and ourselves.

It is said that God's greatest gift to man is free will. "Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall," wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Yet, this freedom is a complex gift, the gift to come down, as the Shaker song intones, "where we ought to be." It is not the gift to do as we please, but the gift of knowing the difference between right and wrong, light and dark, order and chaos, love and fear. The gift of the words that enable us to make these distinctions. In the Lord's Prayer, we ask that God's will be done, not ours. In the act of asking—an act of our will—we pray that God's will and ours will be one. This melding of our will into God's, this sublimation of our will to His, raises ours to a higher status, just as the sublimation of a solid into a gas turns earth-like material into air or, if you will, sky.

We need not be gifted (intellectually) to understand all this. But we must accept the gift of faith, by which I mean not so much our belief in God but our bond with God, a bond cross-tied by our expectations of God (expressed as our prayers) and His expectations of us (expressed as our unifying our will with His).

I had intended this piece to be more about our solemn responsibility to pass along gifts we are given, but my own will appears to have been sublimated to the words I've ended up expressing. Control is an illusion. The passage of time—measured by day turning to night and back and back again, orchestrated in endless circles of celestial orbits—erases and remakes everything. Death circles life, and rebirth starts the cycle anew. God is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we will not be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.