I guess I'm on an Anne Sexton roll this week.  I share today one more of her poems, this one called, "The Awful Rowing Towards God."
     It begins with lines describing the ins and outs of her childhood, "a story, a story!," filled with her affection for her dolls, her experience of school, her encounters with various people she comes across.
     Roughly midway through the poem, Sexton observes that as she continues to grow, "God was there like an island I had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked; and I grew, I grew . . . I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life . . . but there will be a door and I will open it and I will get rid of the rat inside me, the gnawing pestilential rat.  God will take it with his two hands and embrace it."
     Sexton echoes a perennial human longing and desire:  to know God.  Believing that she will see a door, one day, a door which she opens, a door through which will embrace the fullness of her flaws and despair, Sexton continues rowing, always rowing toward God.
     So many of us are rowing, rowing through life, rowing through its joys, befuddlements and challenges, rowing toward an island we would like to think is there, rowing toward God, however we define him.  It is, as the poem concludes, our "tale," good and bad, sweet and not, the story of our life.
     Yet the poem finishes with this line, "this story ends with me still rowing." Sometimes God seems frightfully distant, sometimes he seems very near; we will never know everything about him in our earthly life.  Faith is believing that even though we are "still rowing," daily dealing with the contingencies of existence, we are nonetheless rowing with and toward purpose, the person of God.
     Otherwise, we're just rowing down an bottomless stream, living, enjoying, yet one day losing it all, without possibility of return.