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Thursday, December 31, 2009
Listen To Your Life
The beginning of a new year naturally provokes some degree of introspection. We review the past twelve months' worth of thoughts, feelings, and actions, regretting some (few?) and rejoicing in others (many?). And we resolve to mend our ways, at least here and there, now and then, so we might more closely live up to our own ideals, let alone anyone else's.
It's not uncommon for people to get discouraged about this process, to grow weary of trying and finally dismiss the whole resolutions thing as a futile exercise in failure. But I'm convinced it's a crucial part of our human nature to stop, look, and listen to our lives. To take stock of where we've come so far, to set our sights on where the road could and should lead from here.
A quarter of a century ago, my hero Frederick Buechner wrote a memoir, Now and Then,* in which he reflected on his life and work as a Presbyterian minister, teacher, and author. In his fifties at the time, he lived quietly in a small Vermont town with his wife and three daughters.
One key outcome of his literary self-examination was the following profound observation about not only his own life, but yours and mine as well...
I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.... If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Happy, blessed New Year!
* Published by Harper & Row, 1983
posted by Jack Buckley at
12:06 PM
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