Makes whole the ruined

Jetty wave
Originally uploaded by Elizalou.

A weekend away to a beautiful place is good for the soul. (Although I will never understand why the airport security guy took away my tiny, less-than-three-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer and told me that if I'd had it in a clear ziploc bag in my purse instead of just loose in my purse then I would have been able to keep it.)

I posted recently that I've been enjoying Julia Sweeney's writings about atheism, skepticism, and letting go of God. Her words and ideas have really resonated with me. I read what she writes, and I think, totally. I totally agree with that. Science! Intellectualism! Facts! Of course.

I just finished Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which is a book not about letting go of God but about seeking God, and it totally resonated with me, too. I loved every page. It moved me the way that Anne Lamott moves me, the way that the Weepies move me. I think I'll read it over and over, and I think it could even possibly change my life a little bit.

So I'm not sure what to make of that.

I marked this passage (along with about two dozen others in the book) because it sounds like Elizabeth Gilbert loves her sister like I love my sister:

My sister's faith is in learning. Her sacred text is the Oxford English Dictionary. As she bows her head in study, fingers speeding across the pages, she is with her God. I see my sister in prayer again later that same day when she drops to her knees in the middle of the Roman Forum, clears away some litter off the face of the soil (as though erasing a blackboard), then takes up a small stone and draws for me in the dirt a blueprint of a classic Romanesque basilica. She points from her drawing to the ruin before her, leading me to understand (even visually challenged me can understand!) what that building once must have looked like eighteen centuries earlier. She sketches with her finger in the empty air the missing arches, the nave, the windows long gone. Like Harold with his Purple Crayon, she fills in the absent cosmos with her imagination and makes whole the ruined.

My sister has made whole my ruins for as long as she has been alive. I hope to be able to do the same for her, again and again and forever.