OUR LIFE IS NEVER OVER

That wise observer of the human condition, the late Yogi Berra, once opined “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” If that wasn’t a wise-enough observation, he also let us know that “It (the opera) ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” I was reminded of Yogi’s observations while reading Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo would have agreed with Yogi. Let me explain.

I was amazed to learn that Leonardo had only completed about 15 paintings throughout his life. For the most part he never believed that any painting was ever complete. There was always something that could be improved. He even carried his famous Mona Lisa with him till the day he died, obviously believing that he might still be able to improve on that magnificent work of art.

All of which brings me back to Yogi. No matter what fork in the road we take, the rest of our life will be affected by what happens to us once we head down that fork. Moreover, everyone we encounter down that road and beyond will be affected by their encounters with us as we will be affected by our encounters with them. We are all changed by what happens down that fork in the road and changed forever.

And as for the opera being over after the aria is sung, fat lady notwithstanding, it really isn’t over. We carry that experience with us the rest of our lives. And that experience affects what we do for the rest of our lives whether we are aware of that truth or not. In fact, our lives are changed every moment of every day by what happens to us in each moment, again, whether we are aware of that truth or not.

In many ways we are like Leonardo’s unfinished pieces. Something is added to our life each moment of each day. We are an unfished masterpiece, if you will, until the day we die. But it is more than that. Even in death our life is not over, and I am not talking about life in eternity. I am talking about life in the here-and-now. We may no longer be physically present, but we are present.

Leonardo still lives on his paintings and in those who are moved by them. We still live on in the people we have encountered down those forks in the road whether they realize it or not just as we often don’t realize how we have been affected by the operas we have heard, the books we have read, the people we have met.

If you are like me, we hardly ever give a second thought about how such a mundane fork in the road will be important in our lives and in the lives of others, that who and what we encounter down that road will keep us alive long after we have been dead. Somehow I think that in the back of Leonardo’s mind was the realization that he would live on in the lives of those who viewed his works and he wanted to make sure that his work was the best it could. It was never finished. His life would never be over and neither will ours.

FIVE TRUTHS

A while back I came across a short piece called "Five Truths to All World Religions." I don't know the author and so cannot verify the truth of these truths. At first and second reading they seem valid and seem to be truths that any world religion would hold. Personal and/or cultic religions might believe otherwise. Herewith are the five truths  along with my thoughts.

Life is hard. No kidding. Or as Scott Peck says at the very beginning of The Road Less Traveled, "life is difficult." Another truth to that truth is that as individuals we tend to make our own lives even more difficult by taking the more-traveled, seemingly -easier, but in the end, even-more difficult roads. We are our own worst enemy.

           

We're going to die. The younger we are, the less we believe that, or at least act as if we don't believe it. We do some very foolish things, dangerous, life-defying things. As we grow older, we do everything we can to delay, postpone death, or make believe through all kinds of cosmetic covering or extraordinary medical procedures that it won't happen to us, at least not in the near future.

           

We're not as important as we think we are. That's certainly a blow to our ego. But it is true. When we fall victim to #2 above, the world will go on as it always does and always will. It will adapt when we are no longer there. It will overcome, just as we must go on when others, even more important than we, die. We adapt. We go on.

           

We're not in control. We wish we were. Oh, how we wish we were. Life would be so much better for everyone if we were in control. We would make sure of that. The reality, of course, is that no one is ultimately in control – except God. We'd love to play God, but that job, fortunately for us, is already taken. All we can do is control what we can control, namely our own thoughts and words and actions.

           

Life is not about me. We, you and I, are not the center of the universe. We are only one small part of it, an important part, to be sure, but only a part. That does not mean that we are unimportant. It simply means that the world does not revolve around me, my wants and needs, even if I think it should, even when I sometimes act as if it does. It doesn’t and never will.

           

We all know that those truths are true, valid, and certainly undeniable. And even though we spend much of our life and too much of our time trying to deny, overcome or prove false these truths, in the end truth always wins out, much to our chagrin and often to our pain and discomfort.

           

What makes these truths even more difficult to bear is that we too often forget that we have help ready at hand to deal with the harshness of life, the certainty of death, the humbling of our ego, the loss of control and the importance of others. That help is the grace of God in and through the community of people who gather with us in prayer and praise of that God.

THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE

I don't know who first made the observation that the opposite of love is not hate but, rather, indifference; but, I think, that was a correct and honest observation. The observation was also probably very personal.

           

Love is active. So is hate. Telling another that we love that person is all well and good. But if that love is not active, if we don't demonstrate that love by our actions, if we don't do love-filled things, then our profession of love is not real and does not really matter. They are merely empty words that sound good and may even may make us feel good. But the truth is that we only love by loving.

           

And so it is true with hate. We hate by hating. We're active about it. We do hateful things, say hateful words, think hate-filled thoughts about the one we hate. Not a pleasant thought, of course, but true.

           

We can all recite countless stories of loving actions and countless stories of hateful actions. All we need do is pick up the daily newspaper and find accounts of many of both. A report on feeding the hungry is counter-balanced by a report of the murder of another innocent person. An article on doctors treating patients at a free clinic is counter-balanced by the refusal of medical services because a couple has no insurance. The list goes on.

           

However, in many ways those are easy stories to tell and to contrast. It is easy to balance love with hate, or least know they are always in direct conflict. And it is even possible to convert an active hater into an active lover, although that is not so easy, as the situation in so many countries around the world and, sadly, even in our own country, remind us on a daily basis.

           

What is difficult to do is to convert one who is simply indifferent to the pain and suffering of others, or simply indifferent period. While love and hate are active, indifference is passive. People who are indifferent assert: "We don't care and we don't care that we don't care. We don't care about the other's life, family, joys, sorrows, problems. We have enough of our own.

           

Sounds rather crass, but it's also true. I suspect it is also true to say that there is a modicum of indifference in all of us. And it is indifference. It is not numbness, having heard the stories so much that we are anesthetized to them. It's simply that we just don't care, care enough to actually do something.

           

Indifference makes the other a nobody. When we love another or hate another, that other is at least a somebody. But no one is a nobody: not to God and certainly should not be to us. That does not mean that we can always actively do something for, or actively love, everybody. We cannot. What we can do when we know we can't actively love is at least actively pray. That may seem like the least we can do, but as we all know, it may do more than we'll ever know.

SO LONG, KIMOSABE

Recent re-runs on one of our cable channels reminded me that the last of my boyhood heroes died years long ago. The Lone Ranger went to his eternal reward. And for those of us who spent hours on end pretending to be this masked man who saved the world from evil, it was a justifiable reward.

           

Back then it was easy to know right from wrong, hero from villain. The good guy wore a white hat; bad guys dressed in black, except maybe Hopalong Cassidy. It was all so simple and even so theologically correct: white for good and purity; bad for sin and evil. In the end, the good guys always won and the bad guys always lost. That's the way it was and that's the way it should always be.

           

What was even more fascinating was that the good guys, like the Lone Ranger, were like mythic heroes who rode into town, cleaned up the mess, and rode out before they could be properly honored. And no one knew who they really were. And that was just fine for it lent an aura to the belief that all we need is someone to save us from evil and all will be well, very well at that.

           

No more. Not only do we have a difficult time deciding who the good guys and the bad guys are because they all look alike, we make our heroes larger than life -- and they like it that way. They have flaws but we conveniently overlook them. Humility has gone the way of the masked man and the white hat.

           

That is not to say that the good old days of my youth were so wonderful and that these days pale in comparison. While it may have been wonderful to be able to easily separate bad from good, white from black, in hindsight it was not so simple. We made it that way because we wanted it that way. We knew who the enemy was and we named the enemy: sin, communism, the Democratic/Republican Party, you-name-it.

           

It may be comforting to be able to be able to categorize good from bad as easily as we did by the color of the hat a cowboy wore. But even then we knew it was not that simple. We just allowed ourselves to believe it was so that we did not have to think about it. It made for a simpler life style.

           

Now life is complicated, fast and confusing. But we still seem to need an enemy. We need to personify evil. If it wasn't Demon Rum, it was the hedonistic Zelda Fitzgerald and her Flapper friends. If it wasn't Hitler, it was Stalin. If it wasn't a person, it was communism. If it wasn't civil rights agitators, it was war protestors or women's libbers or gay-rights advocates.

           

But why do we need an enemy?  Pogo said that the enemy is us. Pogo was right. Each of us is our own worst enemy. Jesus came specifically to save us from ourselves, from believing that as long as we can find someone worse than we are, we are all right. Our hat may not be white, we say, but at least it is cleaner than someone else's. Wrong: it's still dirty.  No one wears a white hat save Jesus, who is the only one who truly saves.