The Unfinished Symphony

In a weird way all my life I’ve been very aware of the incompleteness of everything. Nothing was enough. I always wanted more. (Spare me giving embarrassing examples!) Then I came across this gem of a paragraph by the beloved spiritual writer Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest. With time ticking away for me now, a precious time when a vague awareness can assume fine edges and a sharp focus, it seemed to bring its own kind of relief and completeness.

‘Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness . . . But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.” (Making All Things New, Harper Collins 1998).

Maybe this is God’s ways of reminding us not to get settled too soon! Don’t forget the mountain you were born to climb! With you around, dear Tumour, there is no chance of that happening!

Je ne regrette rien:

You may remember, dear reader, my fairly regularly expressed fear of dying disturbed by significant regrets – one of them being my deep anxiety about spending the last days of my life tormented by the fear that kept me from living the abundant life. I used lists of examples collected from the notes of carers of the dying to make the point of doing all we can to avoid dying in this regrettable frame of mind. My particular concern was that those last days of my life – maybe the very time I now have left – would be darkly marked by the fear I usually carry, and how it prevented me from saying, doing or writing the truth of my heart.

This was usually related to the clerical institution of which I am an unavoidable part. There’s the rub! It is not the Church, the loving and free community gathered together by Jesus, the Human One, that frustrate, deeply disappoint, and frequently enrage committed Christianity – it is the closed, clerical and too often destructive institution. However, while I will never be seen as a Dan Berrigan, a Dorothy Day, an Edward Schillebeeckx, a de Chardin, I did, in my own small way, try to tell my truth. I did of course suffer for that; the soulless and fearful Institution always bites back. (You may have your own list of those faithful writers persecuted for their work, even, and especially, during the last few decades. Many of them friends of mine, I know they suffered deeply, unnecessarily and undefended.) But for me the sense of freedom was, and still is, immense. Like all of us, I suppose, I just wanted to make a difference by emphasising the astonishing, felt reality of God’s unconditional love. The Buddhists teach you to say or write it, and then you let it go into the hands of the Spirit of Life. And you resolve to keep doing this with peace in your heart.

One last word here. There is a final all-embracing vision, a conviction that holds, sustains my courage in mornings and evenings of fear. It is happening these very days. It is a kind of gradually-forming vision, a perspective, a radical paradigm shift. It is very like the way Spring delicately moves into our fields, allotments and cities with beautiful feet, or is glimpsed now here, now there, until one day we know it will stay. Put another way, the day will come when, like rain falling on parched land, like light shading in through utter darkness, like life slowly returning to a stricken land, you will find a wonderful awareness warming your soul. It is the moment you know for sure, that the birth and death of everything, the sustaining and empowering of all that works towards good, the precious energy that creates, heals and quickens our souls – is LOVE. It invades me like the dawn. It brings the deepest sigh. Once sensed, the precipice of despair will always remain out of reach. All of this is old hat; we’ve been told it since our nursery years. And one day, sooner or later, it sits forever at the altar table of our hearts.

(From section 78 Dancing to my Death)