After seeing pictures of diseased bodies, I rethink my mortality
And yet.
And yet I am not this body. Or at least, I am not the sum of its parts. My soul is a rare bird, hiding. It doesn't want to be seen, will fly at the slightest tremor of a branch. I am a bird in the element of this body; without this air, this body, I would lose my definition.
I'm not ugly. People compliment the way I look, sometimes. And I have long sought to please, found meaning in the eyes of others. What happens to that process when this body decays? Through what powers will I earn love if not through the power of my body? Will my soul shine forth, through the eyes? Will I be revealed in greater clarity? Will I finally understand Grace?
Disease, deformity, disintegration. The body tires. The body fades. The body slumps, contorts, malforms. Things lose their straightness, go crooked. No choice but to meet death as a friend, to accept it as part of life, not its enemy: the soil healing over my bones, gratefully receiving me into a new order, a new beginning.
I begin to think about what it would mean to have a faithful love
It's going to take a lot of love to get through this life in tact, as a whole person. ("Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" -- Bonhoeffer says that the word Jesus uses for "perfect" here is better translated as 'wholeness'.)
And it's going to take a lot of faithfulness to support all that love. So be ready. Don't close your eyes. Keep a clear head. You'll need it to recognize her when you meet her. Something about the eyes, the way they don't look away from sadness, despair, or injury.
Where lowland is, that's where water goes /
All medicine wants, is pain to cure.
There is something about grace there, in those eyes, shining. "I knew you before I met you" is true but not in the way you thought about it before. Be ready to go beyond ideas of wrongdoing & right doing in order to meet her there. Make that your home.
If you want that kind of love then you'll have to be ready. Keep a clear head. Forgive your enemies. Ask for the forgiveness that even now is being offered, has been offered, will be offered again.
Two Thoughts, One Old, One New
First, the old: when I was on a plane some years ago, I began to hear in my mind this phrase: "Put kindness into your body." I began to think of becoming an old man, of coming down with Alzheimer's and slowly losing my mind. "But perhaps," I thought wildly and somewhat fantastically, "perhaps that doesn't mean I have to lose my ability to love and treat others with kindness."
What if we can put kindness into our bodies, imbue ourselves somehow (through Christ's love in us? maybe it's a matter of opening, receiving) with something beyond the mind. This raises questions of the Spirit and the spirit inside us, as my friend Christian reminds me. For truly, "the music that thinking is" goes beyond the grey matter housed inside our skulls. Thinking, habits -- the Aristotelian force of virtue throughout our lives -- is caught up and tangled in our spirits. It clings to us even beyond the body's (which is to say, the mind's) decay. Yes, I affirm this: that we can put kindness into our bodies. Which, perhaps, is just another way of saying that the spirit of who we are is not diminished by our body's failure.
So I say it again: "Put kindness into your body." Perhaps a truer wording would be, "Put forgiveness in my body." For, truly, to forgive is to be forgiven, to forgive is to practice the posture of receiving grace.
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And now, the new: I often think about what separates an authentic, life-giving action from a false, life-stealing one. What makes two actions of similar appearance so different in nature? A man moves to the countryside to live closer to the land. Another man does the same. But one man is full of pride and preciousness; he observes his actions from a distance. My theory: that necessity justifies almost every action. Necessity is what gives an action credence, authenticity. The rock band that plays out of its garage and records on beat up stereos and equipment attains a certain grit, a certain quality of toughness that is magical and beautiful. But only if it remains necessary. If another group were to do the same thing, but from a place of vanity or sentimentality only, then the action loses much of its force and reality.
