Tags
death, die, divine, failure, foibles, God's embrace, humility, letting go, psalm 49, regret, success, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, wealth, willingness
Psalm 49 speaks loudly of the reality that “you can’t take it with you.” No matter our success or wealth, wise people die, the psalm says, “and likewise the senseless and the stupid pass away leaving to others their wealth.”
No matter how I tried to ignore talking about death at the beginning of the day, I kept coming back to it, remembering an often repeated concept of our wisdom work that recommends learning to “die before you die.” What might that mean exactly? For most of us there are events or circumstances in our lives that we would rather forget for our poor handling of the situation or the pain we have caused, but blotting them out without learning the lessons they teach merits us nothing. Owning up to our foibles, expressing our regret, making restitution if necessary and then letting go is a “death to self” that opens up the possibility of a deeper way of living. Not beating ourselves up for mistakes but having the humility to acknowledge that full and true humanity is a skill learned as much through failure as through success seems the only sensible way to live.
If we practice letting go each day of our faults and the perceived failings of others, we will be ready to let go of everything about this human realm to which we have been clinging, be it wealth or prestige or relationship or even the lovely simple things of life. The reward of this willingness, we trust, is a letting go into the divine life that awaits us where we fall effortlessly into God’s embrace.
That place of “not-knowing” that I spoke of yesterday still holds me today as I think of the storm called Harvey that just won’t quit. How do people recover from that kind of devastation – both environmental and human? Even here, at almost the farthest northern point in our country away from those swirling waters and broken lives, I feel viscerally the distress and death. Physical death, the death of dreams, of possessions – all must reside inside any of us who have even seen the images on television and more likely if we know people living in Texas – and today in Louisiana. I have rarely felt the draw of depression on such a scale.
Today we hear Moses (DT 30:15-20) telling the people that God has set before them a choice between life and death, blessing and curse. He urges them to “Choose life!” obeying the commandments, loving God and walking in God’s ways. Whenever I hear those two words, “Choose life” (even as a wedding toast), a tape plays in my head of a long-remembered verse that I don’t see in the Scriptures but don’t know where else I would have learned it. This morning I determined to find out and was successful because another blogger, a Benedictine Sister, used it in her message this morning. She said the author was Sister Helen Kelly. A google search was unsuccessful but I found many references to Helen Keller – a person renowned for her ability and willingness to choose life. But back to my point…
