Redeeming the time

 I sometimes wonder — I expect you do as well — why we are here; what it's all for, if there is a point to it. I usually conclude, as others also have, that whether or not my life has a point inherently, I can make it have a purpose and decide what that purpose will be, by my choices and actions.

Recently I wondered about it all over again. Because I have a lot of pain and not much energy (and high-pain days are low-energy days), it's difficult for me to attempt a great deal and unwise to do any forward planning or make commitments. On the best days I can take a bus into town as well as doing my chores and housework, maybe some sorting and tidying and reading; on the less good days I content myself with watching uplifting videos on Youtube, and thinking. What is the point, I asked myself, of such a life? What point can I make it have?

When I ask myself this question I invariably recall the one thing that stuck in my mind from the Church of England catechism I was required to be read for my confirmation when I was eleven — that the purpose of man is to serve God and enjoy him forever. 

Quite apart from feeling excluded from that entire plan by its relentless masculinity, I am not sure what it even thinks it means. God is silent and invisible, and too big to conceptualise. We create shadows on the wall, projections in our own image, and call them God, and seek to impose them on others. Knowing which one is God and which one is the projection, knowing how much of my own intuitions and glimpses are actual God and how much my own imagination — this is not easy.

There have been people who believed they were serving God by tying women up and burning them alive. Even in the modern world, there are people who think they are serving God by pushing gay men off the top of high buildings and beating their wives and children, and blowing people up. Personally, I think they've got it wrong, but they are, I suppose, sincere. 

And it is, in my opinion, difficult to enjoy God when one has been taught the divine being will condemn us to eternal torture if we do not correctly intuit and acquiesce, in the practise of our faith. Such a God does not sound like someone whose company I would enjoy.

But something else that has floated to the surface of my thoughts as I mulled all this over, is the wonderful Japanese phrase "ichi-go, ichi-e", meaning something like "one encounter, one chance"; an evocative expression of the helpfulness of staying in the present moment and cherishing it.

So I have re-calibrated my aspirations with that in mind.

Because I am not capable of much, I am making my goals small: just to aim at blessing the myriad mini-events/encounters of my everyday, so that to everything I do, each meeting I have, I bring blessing.

I think that can be by appreciation — of the birds, the sunrise, the tree outside my window, my books and clothes, my room, my bed, my chair, my porridge for breakfast, my cup of tea — and also be by kindness; believing everyone I meet is doing the best they can, imagining everyone at this moment alongside me as my best friend, remembering to smile and encourage and listen attentively and make people feel wanted and loved.

I feel quite satisfied with that as enough to be the point of my life. I don't even want to be the Prime Minister or own a castle in Scotland or be famous for my marvellous achievement or abnormal strength or beautiful face. There is nothing I want that I haven't got (apart from some vegetable bouillon, but they sell that at Asda), nowhere I want to go, only a few things I still want to do: but I do want my life to have a point. So let that be my purpose; to bless each person, each encounter, to appreciate and listen and encourage. That'll do, eh?

I humbly hope that at the end of it all I might find I was serving and enjoying God the whole time.