An Actress and a Better World

November 25, 1965
Plainfield

An Actress and a Better World

Recently, actress Dorothy Malone recovered from illness so serious that her heart stopped beating two or three times during several hours of surgery necessary to remove massive blood clots from her lungs. For five days following the operation, she was unconscious; and death was more of a probability than life.

Her convalescence was painful and prolonged, but she commented recently, “All the colors of the world look bright to me now.”

Life is like that, isn’t it? Thirst creates the sweetest water. We rarely appreciate living when things go smoothly; when pain is absent and danger remote. But when we have survived a difficult ordeal of body or mind, then it is that we experience a renewed awareness of that for which we should be thankful:

The blue dark, green light sea
The fair sky and the storm cloud
The rhythm of sun and rain
The alternates of frost and thaw
The pulse of seedtime and harvest
The chatter of children and the murmur of the aged
The sense of achievement when there is strength to strive for goals
The contentment known when we can rest from the work of a hard, long and useful day.
The blessing of parents; the homecoming of children.

Even when we have not been closely brushed by the hand of death or the touch of disaster, may it be that we will be more aware of the priceless gift of life.

May there stir within us thankfulness for human love, creation, growth care.

For it is because the gift of life is so great – that sorrow is keen when we lose someone.

It is because of the potential of life is so productive that tragedy strikes deeply.

It is because the possibilities of life are so rare that disaster is hard and bitter.

Each of us would create our own variations on the theme of thanksgiving. But create in us a sense of life’s magic so that “the colors will look brighter” to us all.

In these annual moments of harvest home, moments with tentacles deep in primeval human culture and emotion, may the colors look brighter as we pause and give thanks for the life that is ours;

thanks for the world in which we live;

and beyond all the transient differences of philosophy and theology, thanks for this universe, our home – our home from which we can never be separated, whether as tissue, mineral, ashes, vapor or dust, for these are all part of us; and we part of them; and our kinship to totality is basic and beyond annihilation.