Saturday, September 26, 2020                      (today’s lectionary)
I’ll fly away
All night I thought about what Katherine Thompson wrote on YouTube about Ecclesiastes 3, especially what she said about herself.
When the Byrds’ version came out, I was becoming aware for the first time that the world was a place full of pain and injustice, but also full of hope and a will to struggle to make it better. That has not changed. Now that I am old I see that both the pain and the hope will persist.
Then this morning I was digging through a dusty, cranky cardboard box of papers and poems from the Twenties (our twenties, that is), and I found “Contact: My Life and Perspective on Counseling,” written for Dr. Neal Gamsky at Illinois State University on May 1, 1979. I would be thirty later that year.
Rejoice, o young man, while you are young
And let your heart be glad in the days of your youth.
In my post-high school world experience, “contact with others in a deep, affecting way seemed to be the exception rather than rule in people’s lives.” Evidence in my life bore that out. Make the best of it, right?
Follow the ways of your heart and the vision of your eyes
But understand that as regards all this
God will bring you to judgment.
The dawn of youth is fleeting.
Each of us starts from a different place, and we need to embrace our uniqueness. As Fritz Perls said, “I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.” This came to be called the “Gestalt Prayer,” and it sure seemed right to me. “I was fascinated with the possibility of becoming psychologically independent and healthy.”
But eventually my fascination faded. I was lonely.
Then with perfect timing, the Moonies found me. My world view took a huge hit. The pendulum swung hard from diversity and freedom to uniformity and equality. Rev. Moon’s Korean roots and his Unification Church drew me into a community where I had no time or space to be lonely.
I was grateful for being put back together. I lived a very simple external life and experienced great richness within myself. Woven through everything was a sense of commitment to something much larger than me, and a growing responsibility to the world. God became real to me again, and I made my own will subservient to the will of God. The future felt more promising than it ever had before.
This was in the dawn of my youth, right? King Solomon must have been an old man when wrote Ecclesiastes 11. His eyes were going, his hands were trembling, his back was bent, his teeth were mostly gone, and he could barely hear at all. Full of fear, he lacked confidence to climb a stair or walk the streets, and rejuvenation through sleep or sex or eating fell more and more short. Laughter and friendly conversations were replaced mostly by labored breathing and imagined death.
I walk toward my lasting home
As the silver cord is snapped and golden bowl is broken,
The pitcher shattered at the spring.
Dust returns to the earth as once it was
And my breath returns to God, who gave it.
At 70, I have some tastes of this, but not so much when I was 29. Everything was possible with God.
I had found no central source of power inside myself to pull everything together. Then I discovered that God was willing to act as a catalyst for my growth. What God required of me was to accept my own freedom and identity as real ONLY within the “limitation” of taking responsibility and living for others, seeing myself as real only as a member of the community of life.
This “contact” with God and others lifted my life for decades. God’s presence endures.
A thousand years in your sight are as yesterday
Fill us at daybreak with your kindness
And establish the work of our hands.
Paul stretched a point to Timothy … we do still die. But not really, and King Solomon’s despair is completely misplaced.
Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death
And brought life to light with the Gospel.
“Pay attention to what I’m telling you,” Jesus said.
Let your heart be glad.
      (Ecclesiastes 11, Psalm 90, 2 Timothy 1, Luke 9)
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