Weekly Message from T. J.

I Can See Clearly Now

I have spoken before about the fun we can have when visitors are here and we get to play tour guide. We dip our toes in waters we haven’t in a while, we ascend the heights of hikes we miss, we eat at our favorite spots. It’s a mutual relationship grounded in admiration of this miraculous place. And my newest stint as tour guide took me to Electric Beach, a place I have snorkeled many times…but today was entirely different. This was the first time I could really, really see.

In the morning preparing for the snorkel adventure I decided that for the first time I would try wearing my contacts when snorkeling. My vision is pretty good, so until today I snorkeled with no corrective lenses—big mistake. I only realized today with my contacts safely in and working all I really had been missing. The turtles I could watch skim across the sea floor, the detail on the shimmering skin of the sea life all around me, and the glinting sunrays streaming past us all in the ocean leapt for the first time in a new, a radiant brilliance I had never known before.

It was such a gift to share this with my visiting friend and his partner. See, my visiting friend and I have a funny thing in common. We both grew up with a friend so close that our group of friends almost never mentioned the two of us separately. For me, my friend Pete and I were sometimes accidentally referred to as Tete (teet) and P. J. And in the decade I have known the friend visiting this week, this was the first time I ever spent time with him without his own childhood friend who was also a close friend of mine. They were always a package deal.

A few years ago now, our friend ended his own life. For me, this was painful and tragic. But for my visiting friend, he lost a part of himself that day. And in the way that only grief can unravel itself across the space of our lives, I know the ways his life since then has been marked not only by their old memories now somehow halved or lost but also by the marring of new memories that could never know the vitality of being shared, experienced together.

But it was over brunch when I noticed something I had never noticed before about my friend. I was hearing so much about what he felt, what he had done. I had the singular sense of a person in my life whom I realized I’d never had the chance to know in this way, as so much of himself. And here across this tiny paradise island a world away, out over the hills and cutting through the churning waters, I see this new man gather and hold new memories to share with his partner, with me. It is a blessing beyond measure that I couldn’t see coming.

…and still, we miss you, our brother. Wish you were here.

Many blessings to you all,

Rev. T. J.
minister@unitariansofhi.org