Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 25, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Walk on through the storm
Blessed is he who keeps faith forever.
Forever is longer than long. Forever shrouds chronos time, and as our own lives are covered, that earth time fades into mist and memory. I imagine this happens at death, and I would like to experience much more of this “covering over” while I have the time to enjoy it.
Time … to enjoy it. We do not escape the strait jacket of time and space while we exist in time and space. But we get breaks and rests and retreats, if we can learn how to recognize and accept these gifts.
Foreverness, eternity, Kairos time … all different ways to say the same thing, begins with my realizing and accepting my impermanence. I become eternal as my ego lets go of its fantasy of invulnerability, of being in charge and of living forever. Kathleen Dowling Singh says, “Everything of value that can be lost … will be lost.” She continues:
Mindful of impermanence, the breath-by-breath arising and abiding and falling of each moment, still we long to exist in wisdom and love and compassion. We want to ripen into the spiritual maturity that is our birthright to cultivate. There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness.
There are 26 Austin labyrinths listed in the World-Wide Labyrinth Locator. I know of at least two more. In churches, hospitals, schools, indoors, in groves and on parking lots, these mazes invite me into uncertainty and, by association, into mystery. In a book my friend Glenda sent me, Francesca Tatarella writes, “When you can go neither backward nor forward, neither right nor left, all you can do is stay where you are and think.” In the middle of a labyrinth, all the way in and not yet started out, a bench sits, waiting for me to do just that. Francesca continues:
At their heart all mazes and labyrinths deal with fundamental questions of human existence. They all play off our relationship with mystery and the unknown – anything that cannot be touched, tasted, measured, weighed, counted, defined … Labyrinths help draw us closer to mystery.
And what, pray tell, is mystery anyway? We don’t deal much with mystery, now that GPS and Google seem to create clarity everywhere. But what if I lose my internet connection? That can happen, even if the new Apple phone tells me it won’t.
Should I even start a journey if I don’t know where it will take me? Will I get lost if I head down an unknown path? If I do get lost, will I be able to find my way back to the main road?
Beyond labyrinth the dark wood of unknown mystery beckons: Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? And what about you? Who is my neighbor? Am I my neighbor’s keeper? What does it profit me to gain the world but lose my soul? Questions like these (except the last one) aren’t answerable per se, but the joy is that they invite constant exploration.
Richard Rohr reminds me that “spiritual growth is not so much learning as it is unlearning, not so much grasping a new truth as letting go of my ego.”
You, man of God, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience and gentleness. Compete well for the faith. Lay hold of eternal life, to which you have been called.
(Amos 6, Psalm 146, 1 Timothy 6, 2 Corinthians 8, Luke 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
