Unexpected destinations

"We all make mistakes that seem to lead us astray.  But everytime they help to get us where we are today.  And it's as good a place as any, and probably where we're best off anyway."  -- The Wailin' Jennys, "Heaven When We're Home".

I stood in the kitchen in the little house along the country road, looking out the window at the pearly luster of the snow-covered landscape in the late afternoon light as I washed and dried the dishes.  Ella, my three year-old granddaughter by marriage, stood beside me on a stool, helping.  Periodically I reached down to stroke her soft hair.  Sue and our other granddaughter, one year-old Lyla, lay napping quietly in the living room.

In the silence and stillness of the moment, I felt a sudden strangeness.  How did I come to be here?  This wasn't in my plans.  I never expected to find myself deep in the heart of the Ottawa Valley on a cold January weekend, in a house with three blondes, all dear as life to me.  What decisions or fates brought me here, and what small, chance events might have taken me elsewhere?  What other destinations might have awaited me?

For a moment I questioned my own competency to live this life, and the honesty of my choices -- if that's what they were.  Could I be a grandfather to this beautiful little girl and her sister?  Was it fair that I should ask for a place in their young hearts, while holding these doubts in my own?  Could I continue to deserve the love of her Nana, and the trust of her mother?  Or would that far line of field and forest eventually call me away, if not in body, at least in spirit?

Funny how much thought one can compress into a few instants.

I remember telling a friend that life is like a maze.  We can't hold a vision of the whole path in our minds; we need a rule to get us to our destination, to tell us when to turn left or right.  I believe that rule is, "do the most loving thing."  Most of the time, hopefully, we get it right.  And who's to know or to say if we come out at the right place?

Certainly not me.

Mid-winter blues

Maybe I wasn't getting enough vitamin D.  Maybe it's andropause.  Maybe I was de-stressing after a Christmas that seemed to last a full month.  Or maybe it was simple sloth.  Whatever the cause, I had little motivation the past week.  I slept late, lingered around the house, watched too much television and stayed up too late.

I know the signs of incipient depression.  I also know how to shake it, before it becomes a problem.  Get out and about.  Get active.  Whether I want to or not.  That's the thing about depression:  it robs one of the will to do the very things that prevent and cure it.

So yesterday, after I woke in Sue's arms, I walked down to the Market on a few errands.  The air smelled fresh, and the sun felt good.  Squirrels fussed in the trees, and pigeons cooed along eavetroughs.  I ran into Susan and Thomas emerging from Fathers and Sons.  I said hello to Ian, as he waited for a green light to resume his run.  Along the sidewalks, pretty girls abounded, with bright eyes and flushed cheeks.  The shops bustled.  As I waited in the checkout line at La Bottega, the aroma of roasting chestnuts wafted through the doors, to mingle with the scent of coffee and and olives.  I paused at the window of Belle de Provence to dream of warm breezes and fields of lavendar.  Later, at home, I wrote a verse of a new song.  Life felt good.

Today I rose with a plan to accomplish a few positive things:  laundry, a bit of personal writing, a bit of work.  I deliberately eschewed a coat or sweater as I walked between the house and the Co-op laundry, just to feel the sun and air on my arms.  I listened to a hour of The Sunday Edition on the radio, and wrote an e-mail in reply to a story.  I gave Sue a bit of help painting in the bathroom.  I grilled a sandwich of ham, cheese, pickles and hot peppers.  In a few minutes, I'll make some tea and start work on some City work.  This evening, after supper, maybe I'll walk over to the fitness centre and stretch my limbs.  Or maybe I'll practice some yoga with Sue.

Time and again, experience confirms a basic truth:  I can't think my way to positive living; I must live my way to positive thinking.

Getting there on time.

"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."  Ecclesiates 3:11.

The title of this blog, of course, is a paraphrase of the famous passage from Ecclesiastes 3: 1 - 8.  I felt a thrill of pleasure, therefore, as I listened to it at worship this morning.  And my pleasure grew when the reading continued past the eighth verse to the end of the thirteenth verse.  It touched on the nature of time, which has long fascinated me.  In particular, the illusion of time.

I feel that I must apologize for the banality of the topic.  The observation that time is an illusion has become commonplace, particularly in the sciences.  We have learned from Einstein and others that time and space are the same thing, even if most of us don't quite understand why.  And yet we necessarily live our lives along a temporal continuum, tracing lines of cause and effect with every recollection and every decision.  Even the Buddha stooped to eat, and I will go to sleep tonight in the expectation of rising tomorrow.

Time particularly fascinates me as a unifying principle in religion.  During her sermon, Reverend Laurie quoted a less-famous passage from Mechtild of Magdeburg.  I knew the quote, but not its author:   "the day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.”  Again, this observation has become commonplace, although few of us can actually maintain such an awareness for more than a few moments, before our egos reassert themselves.  The moment of awareness, though, seems... not timeless... but somehow out of the flow of time.  Which makes sense when we think about it.  Because if all things are in God, and God is in all things, then all things are one with God.  And in oneness -- whether of the spirit or of matter -- there is no cause and effect, no time.

But if we are already in God and God in us, then why do we struggle through time?  A Buddhist might ask, "why do we cling to expectation, to the illusion of cause and effect?"  Putting the question differently, we might ask, "why is God both one and three? Why does time begin and end with the universe? Why did the chicken cross the road?"  

The Buddhist might answer, "because the path and the destination are the same."  Or, to be more plain, because it is their nature.  God... the universe... the chicken... they share... no... they constitute the same dynamic whole.  They do not exist; they become.  God is one:  but he is also the Son, separate; the Spirit, longing and striving for unity; and the Father, bringing all into unity.  Just as the seeker, the path and the destination are all one.

But does any of this really matter, except in the abstract?  What does it mean to us in our daily lives, however illusory they might be?  First, it means that our daily lives are not illusory or meaningless after all.  In our daily struggles, we embody God's own, dynamic nature.  We constitute the God that seeks to know and to become himself -- which in no way diminishes God or us.  Second, it means that we must seek the heaven within and around us -- because we cannot fathom anything else.  And, third, we must embrace Love as the true path to heaven -- because we cannot reason our way there.  As John wrote (1 John 4:16), “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”