Firstly I thought of my own almost daily walks on the same peninsula, albeit on the other side of the harbour. Clemency and I walk whenever we can for all the usual reasons: for the companionship of a shared activity for an hour or so; for fitness and postponing the inevitable consequences of aging; for the sheer enjoyment of this ancient, weathered, once was volcano; (the photo at the top of this post - and indeed, the one at the top of this blog - was taken on just such a walk). And there is the incidental purpose of preparing ourselves for a return to Spain and the Camino Santiago later in the year.
More significantly, I thought of one of my favourite books: Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
In a famous passage early in the book, for example, she describes a frog being killed by a giant water bug, and moves from there to a reflection on the presence of a loving creator in a seemingly harsh and dangerous world. She quotes, from the Koran, a passage in which the prophet asks whether we think the Creator made the world in jest? Life is in earnest and asks of us disturbing questions. I admire the fact that Dillard offers no glib answers, but lives with the ambiguity of the world around her as it shapes and changes her.
Which is the stance of the Lenten journey, I suppose. Our daily Lenten pilgrimage is an engagement with the world that lies around us at every hand; and in particular it is an engagement with the unavoidable fact of life's harshness. Yet man is born to trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward (Job 5:7) As all pilgrimages reinforce to us, the journey is difficult. Our engagement now is painful and at times uncertain, even as we live in the hope and promise of the coming resurrection.
Comments
the first thing that caught my eye was your comment about "postponing the inevitable consequences of aging". I wondered if that was a helpful way of looking at it? (As I write there is a Seminar on aging and Spirituality going on in the adjoining lounge) We live in a culture which in its disengagement from the elderly - (who are usually shipped off into a corner away from the rest of the world when past their Economically viable sell buy date) - sees only threat here. We are in some regards living in unique times culturally, in that we seem to have lost all sense of the Dignity of old age and can only think upon its indignity.
Thus perhaps we might say that we walk daily to more fully engage with and embrace our aging, to Know it and Learn from it, rather than just lie down and wait for it to come for us??
Thus we might in our "Painful and at times uncertain" engagement, we might more fully "live in the hope and promise of the coming resurrection"??
There are inevitable consequences to ageing. We, like everything in the universe, had a beginning and will have an end. And our progression from one to the other isn't digital - it's analogue. we follow a progression like a bell curve, entering reality, increasing our presence in every way that its possible to be present , peaking, then decreasing our presence over years til it fades out entirely. I think this shape should and must affect our spirituality and indeed everything else about us. The fear of it is indeed a problem, and results in the attitudes to the aged you mention and many others besides.
just a thought
Not sure i can buy into the Bell curve analogy - in many ways we are far far more alive as young children than as adults in 'the prime of life'
I guess this way of understanding our existence 'sounds' a little as if the system is closed??
ok.
Surely that means we are simultaneously called to embrace the crucifixion life.
" The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ".
Barbara Harris
Yes
That is it :-)
Put another way our version of Simultaneity may be expected to err on the side of Crucifixion??
Passages like Matthew 16:5 are crucial, speaking as they do of the way Jesus's messiahship was exercised, but also of the path we are to walk. Yes we are the resurrection people but we cannot possibly know resurrection unless we are prepared, like Jesus, to empty ourselves - to allow ourselves to be put to death. For me the daily practice of meditation is practice in doing precisely that, which is its primar value in Christian terms, although meditation might have other, more general human benefits as well.
I think that the emphasis on crucifixion you mention as a past emphasis of the church may not actually be an emphasis on true crucifixion at all. I think that the baggage we have carried since Constantine of being the moral enforcement wing of the state has informed most of that emphasis on "self denial". The emphasis on toeing the line and on not doing stuff we really want to do and undertaking little penances so that God will like us more has been about being "good" and about being seen to be good - that is, it has in an odd way been about bolstering our false sense of self, and has thus been, in the deepest sense, anti-Gospel.
There is only one way of becoming that which we were intended from the beginning to be, and that is to follow Jesus on the path of losing our life that we may find it.