The new lesson is this. I had assumed that the only people
who were entitled to speak with conviction about how accepting your mortality
enriches your appreciation of the now were those with a terminal illness, who
know the number of days or months they can expect to live. But I now understand
that each one of us, if we accept that our physical life is finite, can experience
a richer joy in living - each day is one of a limited number of days, each
summer one of a limited number of summers. Our awareness of the preciousness of
these gifts is heightened by our knowledge that their number is finite. It
seems to me that accepting that we will die is, for all of us, the key to a
deeper experience of living.
As a Christian, I find that faith is the portal to this
richer experience of living in the face of death. For I believe that death is
not the end, rather the beginning of a life purer in its richness than anything
we can know in the here-and-now, and I also believe that as a friend of Christ,
I am accepted, loved, cherished by the Father.
But that’s the lesson I’ve forgotten. I have learned
countless times that I don’t need to create self-worth by actions because my
identity is founded on the love of a God who accepts me, forgivingly, as I am.
And yet again I detect dubious motives in some of my actions – am I driven to
do this thing in order to win praise, or does it flow naturally from a self
secure on the foundation of divine acceptance? Do I do things for others,
apparently altruistically, but in fact to win their appreciation?
I know that I best use my remaining days when I act freely
from a secure, God-founded identity rather than from an edgy need to generate
self-worth. How easy it is to forget this! How easy it is to know it at one
level, and yet to act differently.Sometimes you watch someone over a time, and there are days when they are calm and sweet, other days when they are devious and unreasonable, and you wonder which days reflect their true nature. Of course, their true nature includes both the sweetness and the shadow, for we are all of us a complex amalgam of good and bad motives, darkness and light.
And as such, we are accepted and loved and worked on creatively by the Father. And it is that acceptance which enables us to face with courage and hope the dark gateway to a new dimension where there is no shadow, and where, perhaps it will be easier not to forget the many new lessons which will be there for the learning. A dimension where there is no limit to the number of days gifted and yet no restriction on our appreciation of their richness.
