I am an incurable ponderer. Compulsively, I delight in thinking about ultimate questions, my mental gyrations a kind of exercise, leaving me with an expansiveness of self.

Sometimes the questions show themselves in altered form – perhaps putting on funny clothes, but they never go away. It’s as if I were in a coal-black room, my questions like fingers feeling along a darkened wall for signs of a door opening outward into unexplored areas of being.

Deeply imbedded in me is the question about how I am to weigh the value of my life, having lived into my ninth decade. I am now beginning to experience life’s settling out. The precipitate of my doings is becoming more and more visible as memory brings past experience into focus.

Arthur Miller, playwright, in a Harper’s magazine essay allowed that he long ago used to keep a book in which he would talk to himself. One of the precepts guiding his approach to his work, he said, was that “the structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.” Nowhere has this statement been more significantly explored than in Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Death of a Salesman.” The undoing of Willy Loman’s life was consequent of following the wrong star.

All of us occasionally know times when memory foists upon our attention thoughts of what we have and have not done. It’s not unusual to go through times when like figures in Edward Hopper’s art, we sit attentively alone while conscience holds court. The mind seems to present us with two ways of being: One deals with the demands and joys of these singular lives. The other reaches toward a spiritual understanding of the value of both our successes and our failures, and whether at the last, these two entities may by God’s grace be melded into an acceptable facet of our beings.

Britain’s foremost neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh, wrote in his book “Do No Harm” that as he approached the end of his career he felt increasingly obligated to bear witness to mistakes he had made. He writes about his errors because he wants to confess them, and because he’s interested in his inner life and how it has changed through the years. The epigraph to his book is a quote from the French physician René Leriche: “Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery where from time to time he goes to pray.” It’s not the successes that he most remembers but the failures.

I too admit to there being a place – not so much a cemetery, but a kind of wintry interior niche in myself where faith envisions hovering archangels silently interceding. There I bend my knees in prayer acknowledging that mistakes have been made. I was not always that self that was centrally mine to be.

In the end, it is this incompleteness about us, these shadowy half-formed selves that in the last we must offer up to God, confessing that what has been important to us here seems to get smaller on its way to becoming eternal.

Joyfully, however, I am persuaded that these checkered selves are permeated with a kind of sacramental essence that invites celebration, while recognizing that so much governing our lives is out of sight, withdrawn just beyond the mind’s peripheral vision.

Long ago I read in an essay by Steve Duin, longtime news columnist for the Oregonian, something to the effect that justice is the grammar of things and that mercy is the poetry of things. He then added, “Make no mistake: justice is essential for the maintenance of order and discipline, not to mention sentence structure. But it’s the poet, not the grammarian you hope to see bent over your gravestone, slowly chiseling out the final lines of the sonnet that survives you.”

The Rev. Merle G. Steva is minister of visitation emeritus at First Parish Church in Saco. He may be contacted at mesteva@maine.rr.com.

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