More Beauty than our Eyes Can Bear

Notes on gratitude & generosity

[From the archive: 2008, San Francisco Zen Center, City Center]

—I’m sharing this piece today, on Thanksgiving, 2024, because I often think of the quote at the center of this piece, often find myself searching for it to give to someone because it speaks not just of gratitude, but somehow speaks from a place deep inside gratitude, a receptivity that prepares the ground for gratitude, and it’s one of those beautiful passages you come across in a novel and it feels like the whole novel is there just to create the occasion for someone to say just this one thing.

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, the narrator, John Ames, a minister, tells us of his exchange with Jack Boughton, the son of his dear friend John.

“Then I said, The thing I would like, actually, is to bless you.”

He shrugged. “What would that involve?”

What would that involve? This passage struck me as it so deftly registers a kind of reflex of circumspection I’ve noticed in myself.

The other day, my friend Vajra offered me an orange as I was leaving the building . No thanks, I just had one, I told him. I didn’t feel I had room in my backpack to carry anything else. He said, you shouldn’t be so stingy with these satsuma oranges. Vajra’s reversal startled me–one of the millions of tiny adjustments to the spirit a true friend offers–like a subtle yoga instruction that sets off a cascade of alignments. And I remembered, Yes, part of generosity, or maybe even, not stealing, is actually receiving what you’re offered, and I said this aloud to him, thanking him for the reminder. He agreed. I still didn’t take the actual satsuma, but did take the tipoff it prompted.

The satsuma exchange felt like a warm-up so I wouldn’t miss it when the subject came up again that evening when Lou Hartmann gave a dharma talk. He spoke of his sense of dealing with the cognitive changes that come with being 92 years old. He related a recent exchange when he’d offered someone a newspaper article, and he’d had something clear in his mind to say about it, but in his estimation, hadn’t managed to say it.

I thought back to a few days before that, walking by Lou as he sat reading his mail by the courtyard. I saved a book review for you, he told me. We talked for a few minutes about this review, by Stacey D’Erasmo of Carolyn Chute’s novel, The School on Heart’s Content Road. I hadn’t noticed any struggle on his part at that time, only my own mix of appreciation, overload, and hurry, again, on my way somewhere. Where? I didn’t receive his offering with the space or appreciation it deserved.

But later I went and got the Book Review from his mailbox, where he’d left it for me, and sat there and read it, puzzling through, what was it, that of everything that passes under his eyes, he wanted to pass on to me? But more than that, feeling that strange and comforting light of reading something a friend has given you. It’s you, the friend, and whatever you’re reading, sitting there together.

•

In Gilead, a few lines later, John Ames tells us,

“[Jack] took his hat off and set it on his knee and closed his eyes and lowered his head, almost rested it against my hand, and I did bless him to the limit of my powers, whatever they are.”

Later,

“Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave–that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

I was stunned when I came across this passage. In it, I heard articulated something I feel I’m always grappling with–and in some ways I mean this almost as just a practical problem: how to respond to this constant sense of “receiving more beauty than our eyes can bear.”

I had the great fortune of hearing Marilynne Robinson read recently at the MLA conference here in San Francisco. Having looked to Robinson so often for instruction in this problem – receiving more beauty than one can bear – through her exquisite novel, Housekeeping, which turns these “precious things” into sentences that keep opening and opening with, as Anatole Broyard says “a fondness for human beings we thought only Saints felt,” I could now ask her in person how she handles this. I can’t remember her exact words, what I mainly felt was the recognition in her face when I posed the question, the encouragement of that, the feeling of being blessed.

And what I took from what she said was, Yes, it’s impossible, but we try, and we’re always writing something other than what we intend.

And as the sculptor, Elizabeth King told me once, we’re always doing more than we think we are.

What can we do, but work to “the limit of our powers, whatever they are?”