How Does One Deal With A Life Changing Moment
/So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)
How does one respond to a new challenge in life, when almost overnight, everything changes dramatically? You look in the mirror and you recognise that your old physical self is to a large extent gone. There is denial. There is grief. And yes, in the middle of the tears and self-pity, an anger that could surprise you. Perhaps worst of all, the onset of a gnawing despair. You are in fact experiencing the inner and outer metamorphosis. All the self-help books in the world are of no use, for their premises are no longer relevant to you. The man looking back at you is not the man you once knew. The body you inhabited for sixty-five years can no longer serve you in the same ways. One can pretend to the world that these natural human emotions do not apply to them, that you have been able to rise beyond such fallible responses. Yet, and this much I must say, if you have belonged to the community of believers, and you have seen abundant evidence of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, at work in your life, then you will not question your faith nor put away the trust in the providence of your Creator. But your hitherto public stoicism, and those standard rejoinders to the problem of pain, as theologians have long framed this paradox—so much suffering in the world and still at the same time the goodness of God—will be thrown into upheaval and shaken to its core.
What this “thorn of the flesh” is for the present writer is entirely irrelevant. It is not the affliction itself that is of concern to him, nor is his experience at all unique. What he describes here is an undergoing that belongs in whole or in part, to at least some of his gentle readers. The question, then remains, how does one deal with a life-changing moment that has to some degree, made different much of one’s life. The saint, for there are saints who either live here in our midst or in monasteries or in faraway deserts, will reckon this as part of the soul’s journey toward redemption. Then there are too, the stoics, who courageously accept it all as part of the greater story of the cycle of life. But there is something very much in common in both of these positions, the acknowledgment whether be it manifest or tacit, of the joyful-sorrow of life and of the inevitability of our report here in this world one day coming to its close. From Siddhartha Gautama, to Socrates, to Saint Paul, to Blaise Pascal, to Martin Heidegger, to Sophrony Sakharov, to Viktor Frankl, to Irvin D. Yalom, to Dean Rickles, this ontological acquiesce is there in every profound thinker that has walked the earth. There are those winter seasons in which, as my dear friend Joseph Carvalko writes in one of his enthralling essays, that we are drawn to think of our souls in different ways until that time when they reach "that final purpose" (Paradox of Hope).
Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)
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So we live each day grateful for all we have been taught, not despairing of the new stories we will now live through, and ultimately grateful for these additional narratives we might now write down. For these things, the precious fruits of courage and perseverance are not at all outside the realms of reality and have been manifested in the lives of so very many. And more recently we witnessed this in the life of my late and much beloved Momma. Not long before she left us she “woke” from her deep sleep and in English (her second language which to this point she had almost completely forgotten) to say: “I saw Jesus. He said He loved me.” Her countenance was amazingly bright. Of course, one can interpret these fabulous words in different ways. We took them at their face value, and at that moment she gave us a vision of meaning above and beyond what I could hope to describe here, that change when even at its most difficult hour is not bereft of the light. Suffering can only be met head on, there are no shortcuts to the problem of pain. There on those hard edges of Gethsemane, where the human spirit is tested that it might be refined as gold, awaits the revelation of our true name written on the white stone (Rev. 2:17).
Our eyes and hearts can become opened to astonishing depths of love (now re-defined and re-experienced on account of our new condition) and to all-encompassing fields of compassion once only imaginable when we were at our very best—those days when we refused to chase away the birds from our fruit-trees and considered the practise of forgiveness as the highest expression of agape.
Even with all of the hard knocks and heavy collisions along the way, we all have a fabulously rich story to tell. Whether we can write it down or not, will matter only very little. The narrative will take on its own life to become our legacy. I remember an elderly monk from Mount Athos, Father E., who would refuse to wear laces on his boots. One afternoon after the refectory I summonsed the courage to ask him ‘why’ [and here I must confess to paraphrasing him a little]: “One must be prepared and on time for the unexpected.”
