We tend to think that much is inevitable in our lives. The rising of the sun, the expression of our talents, acceptance of and by others, our mortality. However, there is nothing certain about any of those things. The unavoidable is not deterministic. We cannot be assured of anything.
“Death and taxes”, some like to say, “those are life’s only certainties.” It is a cute expression, dipped in western wit. It is wrong.
I can feel your uneasiness. Ok, you might be thinking, taxes may be negotiable. Observe, for instance, the postponement of tax submission in the U.S. during the 2020 pandemic. Or consider the circumstance of job loss. And a person could move to an island in a distant part of the globe and subsist off savings and the land. But death? No, you might argue, death awaits all life. It is a surety for every species. Anything that is born must die.
Spirit. That is my response to the argument that death – the cessation of biological activity – is an ending, an extinguishment, an experience fit for the criteria of “certainty”. Have you never encountered a child or young person who spontaneously expresses, usually in the most simple of terms, something fundamental about the world and the feeling of living in it? What child does not, at least intermittently, embody the instantiation of being, of wonder, of – dare I say – soul?
Today is father’s day. Early this morning, while dreaming and yet awake, I heard the voice of the universe and its Creator remind me that nothing is inevitable, not even death. During one of those moments of consciousness that occasionally envelops us with the sense of pure “now”, of supreme “here”, I was aware that I was not just this body, that my life was not uniquely this form, that the past and future were not some places outside the realm of experience but rather components of the present that is so much richer, so much more alive, so more more “present” than the experience of life based on sunrise and sunset, you and me, birth and death. As I sit here, welcoming the arrival of words that my fingers release to the air like butterflies spontaneously born from hidden cocoons, I marvel at the fortune of fatherhood, at the sacred opportunity to nurture spirit that does not arrive because of me yet grows, thrives, and soars in partnership with me, if I am open to that possibility. My children came with spiritual pedigrees; my wife and I encountered that heritage, at the deepest levels of our “selves”, from the moment of our daughters’ births. The girls, in fact, named themselves, or were named, in some inexplicable way, by the dreamworld. They did not begin life as accidents of biology and recombinant nucleic acids. They arrived with histories, trajectories of insights and imperfections, spiritual flows seeking fulfillment. If you have been favored to be a parent, whether of a child who is “biologically” related or a marvel of the universe you have adopted or brought to your side, perhaps you have shared this experience, this sadly infrequent but miraculously magical sense of wonder that God and her creation chose you to be help guide this voyager through the streams, channels, and rapids of human life. The journey is not easy; it is not always smooth; it is replete with joy and sorrow, silliness and suffering, sanguine moments of buoyant heart and perfectly balanced points of soul.
I am blessed to be a father. I am blessed to participate in the unfolding of my, your, our children’s collective expedition into timeless growth and development, into their own parenthood and nurturing, into the unseen but deeply palpable love available to all of us through something we call a “lifetime”.
Nothing is inevitable – I heard that message loud and clear this morning, when I wasn’t even trying to listen. Don’t accept the common. Don’t relinquish yourself to the usual. We are not physical frames with singular beginnings and definable ends. All is possible when we are purposeful. Nothing is impossible when we seek poise inside the spiritual.