Poets always offer perspective.
Maybe it’s the autumn leaves but this ancient Hebrew stanza laid me out again.
All flesh is like grass
and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower falls.
There is comfort in mortality in a way there isn’t in the promise of security. Mortality, properly occupied, may be our freedom; and the pursuit of long-life, security, and semi-permanence, a manacle.
Might mortality-occupied change our lives? Could it compel us to follow a lusher, grander, path? Even at our peril, even if the promise of inner-richness was mixed with great risk, which it always is, wouldn’t we take the new road revealed by mortality-occupied?
We can be held hostage by the initials we carve in hardwood. While our in-the-mean-time, which it the true stuff of our day, is squandered by stock-index ghouls and false wages and familial guilt.
In mortality-resisted, our true project, which is our awake and connected soul in relationship, is traded for a semi-conscious glutinous-soul, dying for want of a source.
Our resistance to mortality surely is a shackle, and never more so than when we’re seriously ill, wasting what bit of vitality we might have left on hazy drug-induced denial rather than leaning into the inevitable…it seems almost a sacred mind-set in our culture to view death as the ultimate enemy, but I think a walking-death is infinitely more frightening, and that death can in fact be merciful…(and hope the universe will be merciful to me someday)….and I think you’re right (if I accurately understood what you said!)—life can be more fully lived when held less tightly. (and if I totally missed your point, oops, and use more common, less poetic words next time for my little brain.)
Someone I was talking to once said, after a spiritual awakening which freed him from some great anxieties, “It would be okay to die now.” Having faced this great fear, he was now ready to live.
OK. It’s time for an online exorcism! Enough with this death-talk. As Christians, we’re called to focus on the positive. And that’s why my spirit responds to the new station that’s coming soon, right here in Edmonton – the Crossroads Television System. Hooray for David Mainse! Once again he’s lighting our path with positive, values-based programming, not the down in the dumps, clutching mortality vibe I’m picking up these days from Grow Mercy. No. This is television you can believe in. We’ll be able to watch programs like Laverne and Shirley (always a values-based favorite in my books). Ministry content sparkles with Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and James Robison, and dozens of others. Ask me if I care that Benny and Ken both got an “F” grade from MinistryWatch for their lack of financial transparency. Or that Ken asked supporters to fund his new $20 million private jet that makes ministry stops in Maui, Honolulu and Fiji. Or that Benny lives in a $5.8 million mansion. Whoop-de-doo that James Robison is a regular advisor to Dubya. At least these guys focus on “life” and its abundance. Perhaps we could see more of this kind of thinking in Grow Mercy. To this end, a virtual sprinkling of miracle water has now been applied to your site. You’re welcome.