Date books and meaning (revisited)

I am once again reading Mary Jo Leddy's very fine book: *Radical Gratitude, and finding so much to ponder, even to startle. Here's one of her thoughts that I found really struck a chord. This quote is from a chapter entitled, The Point of our Being:

Consider date books, their shape and size and color, how they are used and why. Not only are they helpful, they are also a sign of identity and maybe even purpose in life. You can tell a person, so they say, by his or her date book. The fuller it is the more important you must be, the more meaningful your life - or so it would seem. You sense your true insignificance when someone merely pencils you in - and tilts the date book toward you so you can see how lucky your are to have been fitted in between all those other to do's. An empty day in a date book can seem like a day devoid of meaning and purpose. No crisis seems worse than losing your date book, because then you wouldn't know what you were supposed to do or when.

Yet, would you still know why?

I may have used this quote before but I find it so powerful. Do we define the value of our lives by how many things we have to do? By how many people we may see in a day? By the sheer number of items we have to remember? And then those questions are followed by the big question: why?


Why are we rushing around filling up our time with all those 'to do's'? Do we have a sense of what the purpose of it all is? Do we have a sense of purpose at all or are we just filling in the time? Why is it so hard for us to enjoy doing nothing - literally doing nothing? Being silent? being alone? 

Midnight wait at the Pizza Pizza

The Buddhist and Christian sense of being in the present moment is so worth giving some thought to. The present moment is in fact, all we have. What if we come to the end of our lives and find ourselves wondering - did I really LIVE this gift of my life. Was I actually THERE for those whom I love? Was I there for the events of history that are happening everywhere around me?

I have recently realized in my own life how much I miss and I am trying to commit to paying better attention. What a hard task though and yet I sense it is the way to real life.

*Mary Jo Leddy: Radical Gratitude, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y. 2002

Easter

I wish you a most blessed Easter:

Holy Thursday / Good Friday

The crucifixion didn't just happen two thousand years ago... it still happens.




 But if we try to care for one another LIFE will thrive for all people...

If God is like Jesus, then we find out that God is not, after all,  distant and uninvolved. God is here hanging with us on our own crosses of terror, loneliness, injustice giving us the wherewith, not just to endure, but in the end, to overcome all that is hurtful and dark in a world meant to be loving and care-full and joyful. 

Whatever our burdens:

 

Holy Week questions

A couple of weeks ago I was sharing about something Elizabeth Johnson was writing about our capacity to ask questions. She said, 
 It shows first of all that we do not know some thing and yet want to know it: we have a desire for this truth...It also means in some significant way that we do have a hunch that something is there to be known...How many questions can we ask in a lifetime? It is without number. No one answer will ultimately satisfy us.

The second thing that Elizabeth identifies is part of this need/ability to ask questions. It is an infinite thirst for truth and an infinite capacity for truth, an infinite dynamism toward truth. For Elizabeth this infinite unsatisfied thirst will continue in our lifetime and only ultimately, be fully satisfied by God who is Truth.

The third thing is that our human nature has an almost constant experience of hoping against hope. In situations of desperate need, human beings nevertheless do not necessarily despair...There is a capacity in us to imagine a better future and to hope against hope for it.

In this season of Lent and particularly in Holy Week, it seems to me that these things really come to the fore in the story of Jesus and in our attitude toward Jesus. For the person who identifies as a Christian, Jesus is the answer to our question and thirst but we are never able to stop seeking deeper and deeper answers as our hope is so often challenged.

For the person who does not identify as religious or is a follower of another way, it seems to me these qualities still hold. We still experience this tremendous drive to ask questions. We still ask where our lives are meant to lead and what our daily joys and hurts and questions are all about. 

Why do we have this thirst to get to the bottom of things or, in other words, to seek the truth? Why do we hope even when there seems no way forward? I see this this as a call to each of us to deepen our search for the meaning of our lives. 
          

Our lives are drawn to 'more'; to longing; to pondering; to storing up...Wm. Wordsworth felt this I think in his poem, The Solitary Reaper. He sees a woman in a field 'reaping and singing by herself' and his final words are;

    Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
    As if her song could have no ending;
    I saw her singing at her work,
    And o'er the sickle bending: - 
    I listened, motionless and and still;
    And, as I mounted up the hill,
    The music in my heart I bore,
    Long after it was heard no more.

More thoughts on Beauty

I wrote last week about questions; the fact that we spend our lives asking questions and seeking answers. One of my 'all my life' questions has been about beauty: why do we even recognize beauty? or why what I see as beautiful you may think quite ordinary? or, what is it that touches us so deeply when we see a beautiful sunset or sunrise or person or work of art or tree or, or, or? More questions!

I was reading this morning some poetry of Wordsworth's, his 'Tintern Abbey'. He is remembering his response to the view and to the stream and woods and beauty that he saw in his younger days and he is expressing something very deep within himself:
         These beauteous forms, 
     Through a long absence , have not been to me
     As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:    
     But oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din
     Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
     In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
     Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
     And passing even into my purer mind,
     With tranquil restoration - feelings too
     Of unremembered pleasure; such perhaps,
     As have no slight or trivial influence
     On that best portion of a good man's life,
     His little, nameless, unremembered, acts   
     Of kindness and of love.  

St Augustine many centuries before put a name to the reality of Beauty and its effect upon us. He was living a hard, self-indulgent life of 'pleasure' and yet something kept nagging at his inner being. I imagine he was a passionate man and so he struggled, he searched and finally put a name to this nagging feeling in his heart. God. And in his "Confessions' ( one of the spiritual classics of Christianity) he told the story of his life and of his search and of the One who was searching for him. One phrase he wrote to God never fails to touch my heart as he speaks at last about finding what he was searching for:

     'Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you!...you called  and cried to me and broke open my deafness: and you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness...'

Sadly, so often we as Christians have not realized that God is Beauty in all its amazing forms and that God calls us, cries out to us and, if we let God, breaks open our hearts to love. That is another thing that Lent is meant to be for us.