Many people have favoured books they return to again and again. Gerald May’s The Wisdom of Wilderness, 2006, is one of mine. Sometimes it just jumps off the bookcase next to my fireside chair. And each reading offers new love and new light.

This evening I’m resting in some words from Parker J Palmer’s Foreword to the book:

Jerry’s last words were spoken to his daughter, Julie, but they could have been spoken to any and all of us: “Trust in Love, Trust in God.”

With Jerry May’s death, we have suffered a great loss. With this book – forged in his living and refined in the crucible of his dying – we have received a great gift. I think Jerry would say that painful but promising paradoxes such as this are at the heart of the wilderness experience, and of the wisdom traditions that have merged from our encounters with wilderness, both inner and outer. I think Jerry would urge us to go beyond our simple-minded dualism about death and life, to see into – and live into – the wild unity of it all.

Jerry opened his now-classic Will and Spirit with these words: “We all have secrets in our hearts. I will tell you one of mine. All my life I have longed to say yes, to give myself completely, to some Ultimate Someone or Something.”

I believe that Jerry’s longing has been fulfilled. Thanks to this gentle, wild, bright, and beautiful man, our stores of significant thought, authentic prayer, and shake-the-rafters laughter have been replenished, on earth as they now are in heaven.

Parker J Palmer
Foreword to Gerald G May
The Wisdom of Wilderness

We’re living, in many parts of the world in 2016, in bewildering and turbulent times. Few of us, if any, have much faith in politicians assuring us of their ability to “make us the greatest …” Many more of us are turned off by such language. How, for heaven’s sake, could we measure what being “the greatest” would look like anyway? By whose definition?

In the midst of the world’s clamour Gerald May’s words resonate still: “Trust in Love. Trust in God.” Simple “last words” that led into new beginnings – for Jerry, for Parker Palmer, and for innumerable readers of his wilderness experiences. What would I give, what would any of us give, to be able to imagine that maybe, some day, some blessed friend or loved one might truly be able to speak of us as gentle, wild, bright, and beautiful – ?