We Alive At This Time
I don’t know what faith tradition you came out of, if any, or if you regularly attended any church or synagogue or other place of worship. You doubtless have been to some kind of memorial service for a deceased loved one or friend. Weddings are often in churches. My Sunday mornings in church for many years were taken up with Baptist musings on life and God and things spiritual and there was an order of worship, including invocation, shared hymn singing, an offering, a choir anthem, a sermon, a reading or two from the Bible, a benediction, announcements. The usual Protestant menu, not necessarily in that order.
If today, April 9, 2020, were a service of the Church of The Inquiry Into A Gratitude-Inspired Life, I would be the one standing up to deliver the reading, along with some thoughts, and it would sound something like this.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. You may be seated.
My text today is from Joseph Campbell.
“The warrior’s approach is to say yes to life, yea to all of it. If you say no to one little detail of your life, you’ve unraveled the whole thing. You have to say yes to the whole thing, including its extinction. That’s what’s known as ‘joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.’ ”
My friend told me the other day about an interview with a Rabbi and a pastor on the NPR program “Here and Now.” They were there to talk about how their congregations were managing the Passover and Easter celebrations in this current reality. One idea that surfaced was that this is actually a time of grace. The pastor said “We’ve kind of couched the coronavirus as this antagonism. You know, we’re actually walking through the Book of Acts right now. And so Acts is about the birth of the church and how there was an antagonism. How do we live out our faith whenever we feel like we’re being challenged?”
Yes to all of it? A time of grace? Seriously? How do I reconcile my personal notion that all of this is an opportunity with the fact that people are homeless, hopeless, dying? Sounds almost self-indulgent. So, what do we make of “Say yes to all of it?”
I came under the influence of the outlandish idea that one could ask even in the worst situations, even with a loved one’s death, “what’s great about this?” Even if there’s no answer available immediately, the mere asking of it is powerful, even if you don’t mean it. My friend told me about the death of a friend and how he felt it was incumbent on him to ask that question in order to live authentically a life of gratitude. You don’t get to cherry pick. You have to say “yes” to all of it, like Joseph Campbell said.
So I’ve been taking that on and using it whenever I remember and it’s very difficult to ask “what’s great about this?” in certain situations, there’s no question about that. But there’s apparently some good scientific evidence that the mere asking is powerful even without an answer.
It makes more sense of an idea like Terry Patten’s. “We alive at this time are the luckiest people who have ever lived — and the ones facing the wildest, most terrifying challenges. This is not just a ‘deep paradox,’ it’s an existential invitation to keep waking up, right now.”
