weekly THIS AND THAT for November 18, 2007: The Mystery of Life Fulfilled

This and That:
The Mystery of Life Fulfilled

The month of November is traditionally has been called the “Month of the Poor Souls.” We pray for our loved ones who have gone before us. I was reading the following meditation on the month of November by Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister, who is a theologian who has written many books and tons of articles.

Fondly,
Father Nick Amato

The sunflowers seemed to go to seed early this year. Thomas–-potter to the world, brother to us–-died in the quiet way he’d always lived and will be buried soon in the urn he made for himself after the surgery proved futile. And in the midst of it, another friend struggles with a diagnosis that defies itself at every turn. No doubt about it. The signs are clear everywhere: The shadows of life are longer now. Even the grass has sered a bit. And with the changing of the climate and the dulling of the sun and the lengthening of the nights, something inside ourselves slows and changes and turns, as well. With the turning of the seasons of our lives, life takes on a far more precious hue.

It is the season of memories now. It is the time of year that piques hope and prods it to doubt. It is, then, the time of the year in which resurrection takes on a new kind of meaning. Yes, things die and no, nothing ever dies because yes, it goes on living again in us.

Death seems so cruel, so purposeless at times. But it’s not. Death is what alerts the rest of us to life–-just when we have grown tired of it ourselves, perhaps, or worse yet, simply unaware of it at all.

Death is the call to look again at life–this time with a wiser eye. Life, for the likes of us, is not a series of struggles and irritations. That, it seems, is reserved for refugees and farm families on hard soil and peasant types on mountaintops and peons in barrios. Our life, on the other hand, is a panoply of opportunities. It does not depend on “luck.” It depends on what we do with it, how we approach it, what we make of what we have, how we distinguish between wants and needs–and, most of all, how much of ourselves we put into making it better, not only for ourselves, but for those who lack the resources even to begin to make it better for themselves.

Death, the awareness of its coming, the sounds of it around us, is what calls us to a life beyond apathy, beyond indifference, beyond unconcern. Death reminds us to live.

This is the period when the parts of us that died with the death of those we loved rise again in the recollection of past moments and the tears of past tendernesses. This is when we know for certain that every deed we ever do lives on somewhere in someone who remembers it. This is when we are made to see death as a prod to life.

The death of the year, the death of the past begins to bloom again in old memories and the lessons we learned from them, in long-known truths and newly realized loves, in new perceptions of past obscurities.

The time is short for all those things. The time is now. The time is for reflection on what we’ve lost in life, yes, but for what we have left in life, too. It’s time to begin to live life fuller rather than faster.

Death give us all the gift of time. Our own and the time of those around us. It calls us to stop and look at sunflowers next time, to care for the grass always, to embrace the planet forever, to pay attention to our friends, to take comfort in the dark, to remember that the daffodils will unfold again. It is time to plant spring in our own hearts, to remember “the light that no darkness can take away.”

Then, when death comes for us, as it surely will, we will know that it is only prelude. “I don’t know what’s there,” the dying old woman said to her grieving friend. “I only know that God is there. So, don’t worry. That is enough.”