What Now Shall I Do With My Life?

Have you ever asked this question:  What shall I do with my life?  It is a question that haunts a friend of mine and it is a question that haunts me every day.  It is an unsettling question my friend says, and I agree.  I suspect it is a question all people ask of themselves at every age.  I suppose, too, that the question when asked at 21 years of age is quite a different question than when asked at the age of 40.  As the years flow by the question becomes an even bigger one.   “What now shall I do with my life at three-score and ten plus 3?  

I’m retired!  What does that mean?  Well, for me it means being liberated.  I am now free from financial pressure; a heavy burden and worry through all of my “working” life.  Indeed, I am free now to practice a conscious pattern of distribution rather than accumulation.   I am now free from the responsibility of raising a family.  I am free from the pressures of employment, since I no longer need to earn money.  I am free to set my own schedule.  I am liberated in so many ways and I am grateful that this is the case.

I’m also tired!  Yes, maturity brings on this phenomenon, along with many other physical limitations.  I must confess that I can no longer do what I once did.  Thank goodness, I don’t have to!  I write this because I want to be honest about this period of  life and admit that maturity has its problems as well as its benefits.

Yet, in spite of being “retired” and “tired,” the question keeps nagging away at me and my friend:  What NOW shall I do with my life?  I’ve found great joy in traveling in these autumnal years.  I have time now to read the many books I’ve always wanted to read,  and I read constantly.  I have found an outlet for my rantings and ravings via a Blog (I am free now to  speak my mind without sifting my thoughts through various filters).  But is this enough to be called really living?  

I asked the question years ago--but it has kept
popping-up through the years!

I’m living the question and awaiting some answers.  I hope they come soon and while it is day.  I don’t want to squander my life (a unique thing that can never be replaced) even in the latter days of its existence here.  Jesus said, “I have come to give you life.”  I believe that, feel I have lived that life (though it has been a feeble attempt) but how do I live LIFE out NOW?  It is such an important question:  What NOW shall I do with my life?

Traces of God--Here and Now

Harmony Baptist Church in a little village in West Virginia is holding a special 129th anniversary celebration.  I was a student-pastor there during my college years fifty-one years ago.  Harmony was the first church to have to put up with me!  This morning I pulled out a little notebook, its pages yellowed by a half-century, and read a few of the sermons given at Harmony Baptist Church.  What poor stuff—those sermons! I was young, untrained, and without much experience, but the people heard me gladly, accepted me, and cared for me.  The people of that congregation were then, and have been for me ever since, an example of an authentic Christian fellowship, attempting in their small and fragile way to do what “Church” is supposed to do—welcoming the stranger, loving the neighbor, and exercising unconditional love for one another and their community—living out as best they can “the mind of Christ.”

Thelma and her family were a part of the Harmony fellowship.  She is 100 (and a half) years old this month.  Through all the years, since my departure from Harmony, Thelma has maintained contact, sharing with me at least twice a year, the happenings in the life of the Harmony congregation.  The invitation to the 129th anniversary came in a formal type-written letter from the “Harmony Fellowship Committee,” but at the bottom was Thelma’s familiar handwriting and a personal invitation, along with her phone number in case I might want to call.  I will not be attending the anniversary celebration, but I will certainly call Thelma!

“The past is with God,” someone wrote (I do not know who) “and the future is with God, and so also is the present, but we do not see or feel this so much.”  Jeremiah the prophet spoke for God years ago and the people threw him in jail because they saw him as a traitor and a pacifist.  They did not hear the message God was sending.  But today Jeremiah is viewed as a man bearing a message from The Beyond.    Isaiah was seen as a dreamer by the people of his day.  And Jesus, express image of God’s person as we now see him to be, was in his own day regarded as crazy, totally out of his head.  It is never easy to see God in one’s own time.

Thelma at 97

Is it so very hard to find any trace of God these days in the world and the people around us?  I think not.  If we would simply take the time to think about the “Thelma’s” in our lives, or this group of people or that, who took the time to care for us, to lift us, to encourage us, to help us, to love us, we will come to know that God is in the present as well as in the past and the future.  God comes in mysterious ways, but my experience has been that God comes to me most in persons—Star Persons, I call them—who have loved and guided me through this journey.  Yet, it is not the person—it is the Spirit, the Mind of Christ—that lives within them.    

The Cries Within

There are those who assert that we carry our ancestors within us. The new TV programs emphasizing ancestral heritage illustrate the interest many people have in discovering their roots.  Are our ancestors living within us?  Are they shaping who we are and the lives we live?   Is it true that,  “a living being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its own existence but all of its ancestors?”  Is it possible that some of those “other fellows” within me (that I mentioned a few days ago) could be my great grandfather or great grandmother?

Nikos Kazantzakis was convinced that within him and through him, his ancestors continued to live, sometimes even speaking through him.  Emerson wrote, “In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.” Carl Jung  reported feeling, “I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors…..It has always seemed to me that I had to answer the questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps, continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.”  Could it be?  We know now that we have the genes and traits of our ancestors in our physical bodies.  Do we also have their living presence within our souls?

What complex creatures we are!  It is not easy to assimilate all the many voices within us.  It is the work of a lifetime and I believe it is a very important work that cannot be ignored if we wish to be all we are meant to be.

Likewise, as our ancestors cry out, along with the other selves within us, there is another Presence, another Voice, which disturbs us, whose dwelling is within each of us.  This Voice, too, cries.  Thomas Kelly tells us in A Testament of Devotion, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner  sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice…”  Elton Trueblood writes:  “A Christian is a person who confesses that, amidst the manifold and confusing voices heard in the world (and within oneself) there is one Voice which supremely wins his full assent, uniting all his powers, intellectual and emotional, into a single pattern of self-giving.  That Voice is Jesus Christ.”

Morro Rock--only the tip--Morro Bay CA

“Who am I?” writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell.  “They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.  Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God,I am Thine!”

Human Nature

At the end of a long genealogy of Jesus’ ancestry, in the third chapter of Luke’s Gospel (vs 38) there are six words that I underlined long ago:  “…son of Adam, son of God.”  Why did I underline those six words?  I can’t remember why, but the words speak to me today of the littleness and the greatness of human nature.  In six little words I am confronted with a baffling self-contradiction that has disturbed the thinking of so many who have come before me.  We are all sons and daughters of Adam, transient wanderers upon the earth; and yet sons and daughters of God, with a real and unquenchable spark of the divine in each of us!  How can we be both?  They seem to be in desperate conflict, these two opposites:  “son of Adam, son of God.”

“What a piece of work is Man,” writes Shakespeare, taking a moment from his intense concentration on the endless human drama and tragedy that so absorbed him as he wrote his plays, “how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a God, the beauty of the world;” and then, he adds, “and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?”  The mystery of human nature was Shakespeare’s greatest conundrum.  He lifts up one character as noble, almost divine, and the next moment he lifts up a pitiful being, vicious, ugly, and stupid. The mystery, “son of Adam, son of God,” baffled him.  The mystery of our complex human nature haunted his plays.  How is it, he wondered,  that out of the same stuff of human nature there came a Nero and a Jesus of Nazareth?

Poets have pondered the mystery.  Browning writes:

“Sadly mixed natures, self-indulgent, yet

Self-sacrificing too; how the love soars,

How the craft, avarice, vanity, and spite

Sink again,

Sliding into silly virtue, and 

slipping into stupid crime.”

That is who we are.  We are the “sons and daughters of Adam, sons and daughters of God.”  We hold all the opposites within us, big and little, good and bad, lovable and selfish, and a multitude of other contradictions forever wrestling among themselves to gain a foothold.  

Arches National Park

The Good News is that we are accepted for who and what we are—and loved.  God dreams dreams for us—always has and always will.  Our little lives can be better, bigger, more gentle and loving, as we struggle to find (for we have already been found) the Love at the heart of all things (including you and me).

The “Other Fellows” In Me

My life has no fixed geographical boundaries—it sometimes goes south and sometimes north; sometimes west and sometimes east.  It is like a world still in the making and subject to unexpected cataclysms and upheavals.  There are moments when I become other than what I usually am. My moods swing from here to there, my emotions run hot and cold, and these dreary seasons of mind and soul bring clouds and  rain and drenching spiritual weather.   I’m sure this happens only with me and never with you!  Someone once said that he was really a decent, kindly and likable person, only there is another fellow with a nature quite unlike my own, who “will come at times and sit in my clothes; uses my name, and gets mistaken for me.”  Sometimes this “other fellow” ruins my day with his complaints, his anger, his depressing spirit.  This “other fellow” disrupts my usual calm and reasoned existence.  And this “other fellow” is not just one.  Oh, no!  There is not just one “other fellow” but many!  I am a divided person with “many selves.”  If Jesus would ask me, “What is your name?”  I would have to answer with the demoniac and reply, “Legion” (Luke 8:30, NEB).

Try as I might, I can’t get rid of these “other fellows,” so different from who I think I am, or should be, or am meant to be.  I have to accept them, love them, and bring them together.  That is the only way I can become the real Me.  This is a life-long work, but a necessary one.  It is a work that must be done in order to become whole, for “a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.”

Arches National Park

From whence shall my help come?  I find help when I imagine Jesus walking along some dusty road in Galilee and seeing a village on a hillside.  Jesus knows there are many different kinds of people who inhabit a village.  Some are nasty, some kind, some religious, some irreligious, some moral, some immoral, but Jesus lumps them all together by saying, God’s sunshine does not skip a single person in that village.  What Jesus seems to be saying is that God loves every person in the village and his love is showered on each and every one of them.  No one is cast out  or robbed of the light of the sun.  I am a village, so many “other fellows” dwell there, and I must let God’s sunshine reach them until we can all walk together as one in the light given by that Love at the heart of all things.

The Life Everlasting

Buddha’s disciples were often puzzled by his conflicting comments about Nirvana.  Sometimes he would talk about it as future, as a hope, as a far-off happening that would come to the faithful at the end of life as we know it.  Yet, just as often, he described it as a present possibility, something for which his disciples should strive to have, and something that they could have, here and now.  His confused disciples finally asked him, “Tell us plainly, is it present, or is it future?”  Buddha answered, “It is both.”  Apparently, Nirvana, from Buddha’s perspective, is the ideal, the best that the mind can think which begins here, but ultimately widens into something better on the other side.

Jesus did the same.  He, too, would speak of “Eternal Life” as being a future possibility, the final consummation of all things.  But just as often he implied that it was a present reality.  Well, which is it?  Jesus seems to join with Buddha in saying, “It is both.”  The world, he says, is a passing incident, a mere episode in life.  Build your life on the future for you are an immortal spirit.  On the other hand, he seems to say it is a mistake to define life simply as a synonym for immortality—that which awaits us when life here ends.  It is that, he seems to say, but it is more.  It may end in that, but it begins here—eternal life in the midst of time.  Jesus’ clear message is that we should begin to live it now!

Black Canyon of the Guinnison

I find most people look upon this “life after death” business with the same suspicion as when they hear a person say, “the check is in the mail.”  Most want “cash,” something tangible that can be used in the here and now.  But what if?  What if “It is both?”  

“This,” says John in his gospel, “is life eternal, to know God”—God as we see God in the face of Jesus.  For to know God is to see life as He lives it.  To see that life helps me know what my own life can and should be—that same life, lived in the same way, within the limits of my frail human nature, inspirited by the “mind of Christ.” This is real life and to do anything else with your life, says Jesus,  is to lose it, to throw it away, to waste it.  What if it is “both?”

My “Mississippi”

The Wallkill River begins in Sparta, NJ and flows north through several counties in the state of NY, eventually merging with the Rondout Creek which flows into the Hudson River.  When I was “Huckleberry Finn” age, eight miles of that river was my “Mississippi.”  We camped, fished, and trapped muskrat along its banks.  We explored the caves along one section of the river created by the great glacier which carved out the Wallkill Valley eons ago.  We searched and found arrowheads and other artifacts in the newly plowed fields which bordered the river.  Native Americans occupied the valley as early as 10,000 B.C.  Neighborhood picnics in the cedar groves and ice skating parties in the winter are a part of my fond memories.  A neighbor gave me a 14’ wooden rowboat one summer.  I named the boat the “Hesperus” and sailed secluded sections of the river with great joy, until the boat was washed away in the spring floods.

  

In the mid-1800’s industrious immigrants drained the swamps along portions of the river and created what we called the “Black Dirt,” producing acre upon acre of rich fertile land. In the summertimes we rode our bikes to the Black  Dirt and pulled onions and carrots for 15-cents a crate as teenagers.  Today, when you purchase top soil in a bag you may be getting “black dirt” from the Wallkill Valley!

In 1990 Congress established the Wallkill River National Wildlife Refuge.  Portions of the farms through which we once walked to reach the river were absorbed into this new refuge which covers nearly 6,000 acres and ten miles of the river.  

The (Real) Mississippi River--2015

This past Tuesday, my brother and I walked along the “Wood Duck Nature Trail” which passes through wetlands for 1.6 miles on an abandoned railroad bed, ending at the Wallkill River.  What memories flooded our minds as we observed Blue Herons take to flight and turtles slip off logs as we passed by.  Many of us are critical of our “government” these days, but this morning I’m so very thankful that Congress acted to preserve my “Huckleberry Finn” fantasy adventures along my “Mississippi” of years ago.