What Matters

I've been thinking about what matters. Easy to lose sight of.

What matters?  What really matters, from day to day and moment to moment over the long, or short, arc of a life time? What matters beyond that arc?

There is a passage in the TAO TE CHING that says "The master does nothing and leaves nothing undone." I have often struggled with that.  But perhaps the "nothing" is a recognition of what does and does not matter, a sense of perspective about the million and one little nothings that we think we must do, that indeed we do, and the million and one "nothings" that matter, in strange ways we can't even fathom. The things that the world calls "nothing" may be the ones that matter most. The things we fret over and stew about and do may, in the grand scheme, be utterly insignificant.

Let your spiritual eye zoom back. Climb to the top of a great overlook and take in the panoramic view of life. What is the nothing that you do? What nothing can you leave undone? 

What matters? 

Wishing you, as I do for myself, perspective in the New Year
.

The Spirits of All Three

Scrooge at one of our performances of Dickens' story

At the end of Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Scrooge vows, "I will live in the past, present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me." I'm not sure I ever truly thought about what this meant until last night. We had our annual Christmas Carol party and reading, a tradition for more than 20 years in our home. During the party, our small house is stuffed with guests who join together in reading a one-hour scripted version of Dickens' story. The party functions as a merry rehearsal of sorts for when we perform it at local residential care facilities.  A few hours before this year's party, my husband and I attended a Memorial Service. At the party, we heard about the death of a friend. And all through the evening, memories of past parties and past performances were layered over every moment.

The spirit of Christmas Past - friends and loved ones no longer with us, the children who were Tiny Tims and have now gone off to college, the years we did 14 performances, the years snow prevented even one, the era of performing the story at the local AIDS hospice until one day it was no longer necessary, and so many more. Every phrase I've just written is connected like a fine gold filament to a deep, rich, true story woven into my heart - some joyful, some wrenching, and I wouldn't trade a single one.

The spirit of Christmas Present - embodied in every friend who came to celebrate with us last night, new faces and familiar faces, the laughter and conversation and food and drink, the preparations, the last lingering musings late into the night, even the clean-up - as well as the many moments of human connection this week with my students at school, my colleagues, my friends and family near and far. Again - not all of it happy, but all of it so real and true and enriching in the best sense of the word.

The spirit of Christmas Future - the knowledge of mortality, which becomes ever more real with each passing year, as friends and family shuffle off this mortal coil. Scrooge's redemption doesn't mean he won't die. We all die. Dickens' Christmas Future is frightening, yes, and yet Scrooge says he will live with that spirit, too, and it is that spirit, that awareness of how "any spirit working kindly in its little sphere will find its mortal life too short," that ultimately brings about Scrooge's fullest change of heart and his commitment to a different path.

We are here on this earth for but a blink of the divine eye. Most of us don't consciously carry that knowledge of impending mortality with us all the time. It's too much too bear. It must be tempered by the spirits of Past and Present. But it must be somewhere in our minds and hearts, for it drives us, too. It drives us to remember what truly matters. What legacy do we wish to leave? How do we wish to be remembered? How shall we live while we are here? Will we connect with our fellow human beings? Will we honor and cherish what we learn from our past, embrace our present regardless of our circumstances, and be cognizant of our future?

Scrooge doesn't say the spirits of all three will co-exist peacefully, mind you. He says they will strive within him. Miriam Webster defines strive as "struggle in opposition" or "endeavor." I think "struggle in opposition" fits here. The three spirits contend with one another, and out of that struggle comes a potent energy for good. It's very much in keeping with the Christianity I know and love, a religion born out of struggle, a religion in which sorrow and joy, death and rebirth, God and man commingle. It is Jacob wrestling with the angel.

Long live the power of struggle! May the spirits of past, present and future strive within all of us to drive our best selves and illuminate all that it means to be human.

A Prayer Trade

As I drove home today, I thought about selfish and unselfish prayer - namely my own. During the dark season of the year, I am prone to struggle with dark thoughts, and to say a few prayers for deliverance, that somehow God will lift me up enough to keep going. I have very few external reasons for my darkness. It travels inside me, to paraphrase Milton. But internal darkness is just as much cause to turn to prayer as external. Normally, I don't think of those prayers as selfish. It's not selfish to ask for help when you need it.

However, as I drove home today and listened to the news on the radio, I wanted to take back those prayers for my own small self and invest them instead in combatting the darkness of the world. Climate change, terrorism, violence, war. Our planet, our world - the huge, overwhelming darknesses we face, those things I feel so limited and powerless to change. If carrying my own darkness and wading through it could somehow mean there was extra prayer energy to fight those huge, terrifying crises that plague our world, I would gladly take up the burden. Given a choice, I choose the world over me. I'm one person, a blip on this earth. But this earth is, can be, beautiful on a grand and ageless scale, if only we human beings could just stop screwing it up.