EXALTATION AND SUFFERING - Homily for the Ascension

"While she lived at Jorundgaard, she had never thought otherwise than that her parents’ whole life and everything they did was for the sake of her and her sisters. Now she seemed to realize that great currents of both sorrow and joy had flowed between these two people, who had been given to each other in their youth by their fathers, without being asked. And she knew nothing of this except that they had departed from her life together. Now she understood that these lives of these two people had contained much more than love for their children. And yet that love had been strong and wide and unfathomably deep; while the love shegave them in return was weak and thoughtless and selfish, even back in her childhood when her parents were her whole world. She seemed to see herself standing far, far away—so small at that distance of time and place. She was standing in the flood of sunlight streaming in through the smoke vent in the old hearth house back home, the winter house of her childhood. Her parents were standing back in the shadows, and they seemed to tower over her, as tall as they had been when she was small. They were smiling at her, in the way she now knew one smiles at a little child who comes and pushes aside dark and burdensome thoughts. “I thought, Kristin, that once you had children of your own, then you would better understand . . . .” She remembered when her mother said those words. Sorrowfully, the daughter thought that she still didn’t understand her mother. But now she was beginning to realize how much she didn’t understand." --Sigred Undset, Kristen Lavransdatter