Life often seems harder or worse than it ought to be — maybe we even tell ourselves that we are worse than we ought to be. Life is a fight, a struggle — and we are contorted and our lives distorted by the fears and pains that carve out some little space for our bodies and our hopes to inhabit. We settle for what is left over after the world disables and disdains us.
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I don’t think life is supposed to hurt. Pain is a signal, a tool; pain is good, it tells us how to be safe, where to protect, and what will only hurt us more. To ignore pain is a rupture with reality, a breaking-down of a system that is there to enable life, and yet too many of us live with bodies that give us pain where there is no injury, no risk, and nothing we can change. We learn to live with denial, and to tell even our physicians and healers that all is more-or-less alright, even when we struggle to walk and to breathe, even when every moment is a brutal struggle.
Life does hurt, life is a struggle, and somewhere in the middle of the trials and insults that confine our movements, we find some little way of living to make our own.
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The human species is made up of aggressive niche-finders, and each individual has this immense capacity for adaptation. Not only are there people who have found ways to live from mountaintops to deserts, from frozen forests to equatorial atolls, but you could take just about any person and adapt that individual to that place. We use language and culture and tools to convey whole new ways of being. We are remarkably able to adapt.
We adapt to the differences and injuries that shape our lives, and explore beautifully the space between the vast expanse of things which we cannot and will not do.
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Life involves loss, and even the opportunities that present themselves to us extinguish others. Everyone ends up with a vast reserve of untapped potential, and of lives unlived, ways we could have been, things we might have done. These hypotheticals, though, are not real life. How we imagine things could have been, might have been, or ought to have been, is not real. We elevate those illusions, which we cannot live, over the real gift of life as it has been handed to us.
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The reading we hear this morning from the Apocalypse of John, the Book of Revelation, is a stunning and beautiful image of the full and unmediated presence of God.
Being in the Spirit, in a state of deep, spiritual ecstasy, John catches a momentary glimpse of how the world ought to be, of how existence itself already is, and of where it all ends up. This is the telos of all our lives, this is the Heavenly City which is reflected in all of Creation, and within which we are already and always held, whether we know it or not.
John’s ascent brings him into encounter with a realm that is actually beyond his knowing, beyond any of our knowing. He uses words to gesture at something of what it is like, but language fails to convey what is really going on.
John writes about all the things that are left out, how there is no night, no falsehood, nothing accursed; neither lamps, nor suns, nor moons. The Christian hope, though, is not in a purification of the world; we do not long for the elimination of the wicked or the fallen, and Christ does not break us up into pieces he can save, and pieces he cannot. The Christian hope is wholeness.
Wholeness means that nothing needs to be left out, and nothing needs to be destroyed. Wholeness means fulfillment of the good in everything, and not the elimination of everything that disappoints. There is nothing wicked that needs to be destroyed in moons, and neither are any of us so accursed that we need to be locked out of the Kingdom of God; indeed, John tells us, the gates will never be shut. In that Heavenly City, the illusory division between the Holy and the profane have failed at last forever, and there is no need even of a Temple.
What John sees is what it is like when there is nothing that needs to be left out. This is, in fact, already the state of the whole of Creation. We are all held together in this way of being from which nothing can be removed, nor lost, nor destroyed. All of it and all of us are right here, knit within the same web of existence. Time passes and we become a part of memory, but that is transformation: not destruction, not decay.
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The gift of life is a time, an opportunity, to love and to cherish Creation, to gather together and creatively participate in being with others. We are sent out for a short while to make something new out of being, and to be worthy companions to the friends who make the journey with us.
To do this requires no great skill or ability, and we are not somehow deficient to the extent that our bodies have limits, nor that our life is marked by pain. The English poet John Milton, facing the blindness that came in his forties, wrote this:
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Life is not about the ways we can busy ourselves, nor is it only found in certain kinds of work, certain kinds of being, and certain kinds of bodies.
Milton discovers that rather than being a helpless bystander of existence by virtue of his frustrating blindness, his life is one of active service, in the presence and the caring he can bear.
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It is a hard thing to be a person, but life is not a game to be beaten. We can imagine how things might be better, but it is better still for us to live, now, in the ways we can. The Glory of God is the human being fully alive, and here we are, and life is ours, and our being even now is ensconced in the Heavenly City from which nothing is left out. The choice to live is ours, and in that choosing we do not fall short or fail.
There is life among those the world disables, and that life is full and brilliant and whole. There is life among those who are so rich that they have tried to cut themselves off almost completely from their fellow human beings, but who will carry a loneliness in their heart which is always calling them to return. There is life among those who are in despair, and who might discover that they are not so alone in their despair as they fear. Life is not perfect, but it also somehow kind-of is, because it gives us this vessel, this vehicle, in which creativity and relationship are possible.
May you be fully alive, and know that you are whole, and always, always see the Creator at work in the brilliant life of every human being. May you love and know that you are loved. May you see the Glory of God in this life, and know that you are a part of it, forever.