2022, You have given and taken so much...
Some years finish and they have a perceptible meaning in them, like a chapter’s theme closing as the main character learns about friendship or hard work. This year closes on grief but also on perspective:
I always believed that there is a particular way of being that is correct. Not for every person, but that there is a path in everyone’s life that is good -difficult, yes- but truthful and peaceful: a narrow place where our wills and God’s greater perspective overlap, and in that place, that journey, we walk beside not only God but also those people who enrich that walk. They are there when the hammer drops, the rug gets pulled out from under your feet, and you realize that suddenly you are
Falling
Falling
Falling.
But this year when I was falling and I braced for hitting rock bottom, I never came. Instead, I found myself suspended above that hole by a net woven of fine and intricate silver thread. I was caught by arms made of love, broken down into the individual faces of every person who touched my life. Who held me, spoke to me, listened to me, laughed with me, and cried with me. Together and inextricably intertwined with me, we were all there together forming an avatar of Christ.
If God’s Will is a particular path, I believe that path changes and shifts in seemingly arbitrary and purposeless directions. Veering suddenly to the left when I had already comfortably set my course to the right because I was used to going that way and that was the direction and pattern the path had been until now. Until it isn’t. and you fall. And it never hurts less.
But I have also found how little it matters if you scream, “Why?” five thousand times, trying to understand the broken pattern that left us flat on the ground yet again. -even if just days before everything was perceptively perfect.
Because grief, tragedy, and unexpected turns- aren’t “why” events.
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Psychologist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl examined the tragedies of his experience in Auschwitz and came away realizing that, like Job, we entirely miss the point of we yell into tragedy “why.” We do not get to ask that question, no matter how much we ache to know where exactly it all broke down. “It does not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who are questioned by life... and our answer must consist, not in talk, but in action.”
I distinctly feel that the answer to that question is to continue to love; love with; love continually; love despite: When our reality shifts, everything is made good by God through love. The tragedy is made bearable, memorable, profound, by the framework, we build up around ourselves in good times.
So, we link arms with friends, family, community, and world and go forward carefully and joyously and become part of that web- those open hands that, when another fall inevitably comes, or when a friend beside us falls into a hole we too have stumbled into, one is caught up surprisingly, walking on again hand in hand together
Forward into a New Year.
Welcome, 2023.
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