Death, birth and the other stuff (from my current project)

I read recently that half the men who make seventy don’t live to eighty. And while I was just getting reconciled to more chins and wrinkles, rebranding them as a severe beauty, a new humility, they were simply  preparing me for that final desiccation.
So how do we reconcile the chasm between our received history and an intuitional hope fo the future? Is there a way to break through? Is there room for the possibility of an alternate reality, an afterlife, in the plausibility structures we currently carry. Can the models we currently carry allow other modes of being that might be beyond our present time-space continuum: some “there” where we are not yet? Are  there some options for newborn insights towards an unforeseeable future that we can follow with some good faith?

Yet I write this sentence seven hours after I awakened and started the page above, and the world has changed beyond expectation. I ended up going to the gym, diving into the pool for senior water aerobics to early Beatle songs, afterwards showering and snaking on yoghurt and nuts with friends. Later I ate lunch out, picked up laundry, returned home and ended up spending the afternoon sitting and writing as a somewhat different person than I was just a few lines back, a few hours before.

That day may be unique, but it is not uncommon: it is like that every moment of life, every morning I wake up, every day that I live. But how do I enhance this awareness of the curving continuum of past, present and future?

I used to see myself as incorrigibly incomplete, I now believe I am unfinished, a product in process. And that makes a large difference, makes the balance better, because the “incomplete” side of the equation might mean a fear of being found out as lacking, losing the game before it’s over; where moving to “unfinished” can be transformational. Incomplete closes in on judgment where unfinished opens to new perceptions, new  birth and  beginnings: something old might die but a new creation can show up right at the same time. Maybe recent technology can offer fertile avenues and images for larger realities and new connections to emerge.

Anyone over the age of fifty knows the vast difference between typing a page back then and writing a document now. Here I blithely run through this black and white world of keys and symbols, pushing squares and watching words appear, both the operating system — which I experience as a benevolent force — and the craft required to attend it has become gentle and more tender than it used to be.

For thirty or forty years ago writing required carbon paper and mimeograph masters, a paste labelled whiteout and sometimes thin and easily crinkled erasable bond. I remember one existential moment when I decided not to sharpen a particular sentence because of the effort required in correcting the choices already committed to the paper.

But now this old man revises with abandon with no erasable bonds being broken, no paper torn asunder; for technology has made me a new creation, offering a graceful process akin to what one mystic called “continuing renewed immediacy,” and moving from process to product even while keeping an appearance of conceptual virginity on each and every page. I find it an exercise that  comes close to approaching the God-head and a deeper ecstasy — for every time I touch Command/S, all things become new again and we are not far from heaven now.

Happy New Year and Advent comes again!

One Sunday a few years ago on the first Sunday of Advent I baptised three young people and I wondered what to say to them about what they were doing. About the history, the story, the community they were becoming part of, as well as the gifts and promises it offers. I wanted to offer some thing they might understand and remember, as well as speak to the people  who gathered to celebrate the gift this family wishes to share, people who might not know the ways of the church, who might see this as a colourful and archaic ritual. That’s not easy, like the psalmist  says, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Here’s what I said then:

What we’re doing today is telling a story, about one person, about every person, and about the whole universe. The one person was a man named Jesus: he lived a long way from here about two thousand years ago, and when he grew up he told some stories and taught some lessons and healed some people and shared food and hope and love in a world where there wasn’t much of that around. He seemed to live like there was more than enough, and that the liveliest thing that he, or anybody, could do was to keep sharing food and hope and love, and not worry about it too much. He lived like that was the easiest, truest, most joyful way to live and to love life for each person, for every person, for the whole universe.

And he kept doing it. Even when the people who were worried about many things told him he better be careful, he went on sharing food, hope, love like it couldn’t end. So some other people decided to kill him, partly because when people start giving like that, the world gets bigger, and gifts like food and hope and love can start people  doing new things, going in different ways, and that can be dangerous for people who want the world to be safe and predictable and profitable for them and the same as it ever was.

So they killed him. They tried to wipe him away from life, from everyone’s memory, so that nothing would remain, and it didn’t work. Because of the simple truth, the deepest fact (and this is the centre of what I’m saying), is that we believe that this kind of love lasts. So it wasn’t long before a few people said they had seen him alive, others said that he had somehow gotten past death. some said he was still sharing like before, now even more. And it was as if his very breath was breathing everywhere, was willing to show up, sharing, in everyone, first a few people, then more, then millions, took up the promise to breathe life the way he did in sharing life and food and hope and love.

It’s changed the world for the last few thousand years, not always for the best. Sometimes it’s been like a great big party, sometimes like a really bad committee meeting, but there is still this company of people who are trying, as best they can, to share food, hope and love.  And even though Jesus is not around like he was two thousand years ago, he’s still here, in stories told, gatherings held, food, hope and loved shared — really in every moment and every breath he still shares this love of live, this life of love.

Because he was, he is, a gift to remind us of what we deep down are: born of love, born to hope, born to share food; food for thought, for nourishment, for inspiration, to be part of a body bringing healing and hope to the whole creation.  That’s what we were created to be; and we forget that, get lost in other stories, worry about many things, forget who we are, where we come from, what we’re to do: which is mystery and meaning and justice and joy and shared food and wine and life that is so much bigger than all our understanding and any kind of death that it is almost beyond belief.

But we’re here to get reminded, renewed, in telling the stories, sharing the journey, the hope and healing, the bread and wine, the new and renewing loving life that Jesus said is in the heart of everything, that we experience what life is, what God calls us to love, even now.

So that’s what I told them. It’s true, though not the whole truth, but i hope it’s true enough to welcome them to the party and give them a taste for travelling together on this journey, but, if you've been around the church for awhile, for some days, when God’s Advent comes, it’s often not easy. But it’s good, and in the end, by God’s grace, it’s worth it. 

May your Advent be blessed.