Coracle Trust E-Reflections
Caught by a strange warmth and a crackling sound
Tuesday 2 November 2010
Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you. R.S.Thomas, the Bright Field
Picture: Marcus Obal from Wikimedia Commons http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/FIRE_01.JPG Audio: crackling fire Video on poet R S Thomas. Scripture: The angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, "I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up." (Exodus 3:2-3, NASB)
A Question of place
The words ‘receding future' remind me of carrot and stick, dog and ball, something that keeps us ahead, pulls us out of ourselves. The mystics rightly call us back from the future, where we often live imagining great and small evils, and pull us out of the past, slumped in what has been lost. Richard Rohr puts it well: Jesus says of the past ‘it’s forgiven’, and of the future ‘don’t worry’. The present may seem vacuous, simple, thin. But it's also invested with the eternal. ‘Here and now’ captures the question of place at midlife: Where am I living? The past, the future or the present?
A Question of tail chasing?
Being on the cusp of young and old seems to draw out that most menacing of questions, What is the point? Ecclesiastes ties meaninglessness with tail chasing. Who’s calling the tunes of this ‘hurrying on’ and ‘hankering after’ – my anxiety? another’s fear? some vaguely drawn purpose that’s out there and superimposed upon my body, time and energies? The end of the film The loneliness of the long-distance runner comes to mind and it's further question, Who’s life am I living? Where in my day am I stopping, turning aside to be warmed by the now, and present to my one and only life? Selah.
