Has my life counted for anything? I will be remembered for a short span after I die. My great grandchildren will maybe do a bit of research … just maybe … and then . . . obscurity.
I recall once walking out of a visit with a man who had advanced Alzheimers. He smiled and listened and nodded, but never initiated any conversation. As I left, I sighed deeply. Did the visit matter? He would not remember it, and no one else who cared knew about my visit and I was not one to tell them lest they think I was seeking applause. Was there any point in repeating my bi-weekly visits? A friend who headed up the local Alzheimer’s Association said, with some heat, “But you enlightened him in the moment! That is an eternity of time for him!”
Then I recalled, God lives in the eternal NOW. He has no past, present or future, only now. That is because He is, as the Creator, outside of the universe, and therefore outside of our linear sequence of time. I refreshed my resolve to live in the Eternal Now with Him.
Even when I wasn’t constantly aware of God’s unwavering presence, living in the Eternal Now meant “He knew the path” and was a silent companion on the journey. It is impossible to calculate the impact of His unseen Presence, and I know that, once we get the full picture, the knowledge of His action in the unfolding of our lives will astonish us.
Christian Wiman wrote in the Quarterly Magazine Plough, “Ifs Eternally”: “The revelation we want – or at any rate the revelation we need – is not ultimate, but intimate. Who could guess that one of life’s most piercing discoveries would be a kind of edgeless entropy, this feeling – or is it a lack of feeling? – slowly creeping into all the crannies of your consciousness, a kind of claustrophobic panic that neither the events of your life, nor the people therein, nor the whole “million-petaled flower of being here” have added up to anything at all? What is the final revelation that life grants you? That there will be no final revelation.”
And he quotes Melville from Moby Dick:
‘There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: – through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
And he concludes
“What one wants as one grows older is some assurance that between the endless errands that crush the soul and the sudden warbler that ignites it, between the bills and births and meals and funerals, all the graces and losses of any life attended to no matter how erratically or imperfectly – under it all there must exist some intact tissue of meaning. Not meaning such as one might fully articulate or grasp, but a deep instinctive sense, an assurance, that in the “incorrigibly plural” swirl of life there abides some singularity of being, however fleeting its presence:”
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/ifs-eternally
Joseph Heller, in God Knows has King David say: “Who would have thought back then that a king like me might someday find himself embarrassed by hemorrhoids and an enlarged prostate, or that one with so hale and suspicious a beginning would eventually lapse into moldering spells of solitary depression and anxiety? Who needs it? Who can stand it? Desire has failed. I get up with the crickets. I can’t keep awake and I can’t fall asleep. In the morning I wish it were evening, in the evening I wish it were dawn. “How a person feels at the end of his life will tell you about the quality of it all.”
“How a person feels at the end of his life will tell you about the quality of it all.”
Does my life matter? In the moment, amazingly, yes!
In all the moments, absolutely!
Our English teacher, affectionately, or maybe maliciously, known as Muff, at Capricorn High School in Pietersburg asked the question: “What is life?” The class was dumbstruck. I was 15 years old and had not even a hint of an answer. The question, however, tweaked my interest. He called on various students for an answer, and there was a lot of bumbling mumbling. His answer was, “Life is intensity of awareness.” That registered, and I resolved to practice it.
Resolved: Enhance the quality of life by being intensely aware in every moment, in every step: of the people, of nature , of events, of situations. And yes, most important of all, awareness of friendship, and the ultimate friendship with God.
“The revelation we have is not ultimate, but intimate.”
progressingpeople 