Until We Meet Again . . .

". . .we are transitory and hazardous, slight things and light." -Algernon Charles Swinburne

Recently, I read the following assessment of the French novelist Marcel Proust, written by the German cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin:

He [Proust] is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true drama of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us--this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home.

His claim that "none of us has time to live the true drama of the life that we are destined for" was prescient, and it strikes home. How often do we feel and realize that we are simply going through the motions, trying to get through another day, and that, meanwhile, life is just passing us by? Our own lives? Yet, we seem unable to do much, if anything, about it.

I was reminded of Thoreau’s famous passage in Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." I worry about that a lot, too. I wonder if I am truly living life, and often I know, or at least suspect, that I am not.

Summer gives us an opportunity, if we will take it, to reconnect with what is really important, to remind ourselves of who we are and why we do what we do. It gives us an opportunity to live our lives, to live in our lives. I don’t want to be absent when "the great passions, vices, and insights" of my life call on me! Too often, though, I’m afraid that I am. Too often, and perhaps especially at this time of year, I feel that I am no longer "at home" at all, and I need to be. I need to get back home.

That is why I believe it is so important that we find times to get back in touch with ourselves and with the "drama" happening in our own lives. The transition from spring to summer and from the end of a busy church year to a few blessed weeks of restorative and restful vacation time offers such an opportunity. The poet Theodore Roethke writes in a poem entitled, "In the Time of Change":

All things must change: the vision pass,
The shadow lengthen on the grass,
The ship go down behind the sun,
The passion of the heart be done.
The flower droops; we cannot stay
The lovely miracle of May.

But in the time of change, a rare
Illumination fills the air.
There is a shift, a holy pause
Between what is and what once was.
The senses quicken with delight;
The scene grows pure upon the sight.
Our fixity is lost; the eyes
Look out with passionless surprise,
And in that instant we may see
The shape of an eternity.

As I look back upon my life, and upon all of the incredible, often tragic but also triumphant, historical events that have taken place during it, I recognize that there were times when I was simply sleepwalking, oblivious to what was taking place around me, distracted or perhaps just so caught up in my own day to day existence that I missed the great things taking place all around me. Too often, I have failed, in Benjamin’s words, "to live the true dramas of the life that [I am] destined for."

Perhaps this is mostly inevitable, but maybe it doesn’t have to be so all of the time. We get preoccupied. We have jobs to do, children to raise, careers to develop. We have our little and our larger personal problems to deal with. Meanwhile, though, our lives are going by and we hardly notice, until someday when we look back and wonder where the time has gone. "Who knows where the time goes," Judy Collins sang so poignantly, and as we grow older we wonder, too, more often and sometimes more painfully.

I was especially struck by this reality of life passing by when I read, several years ago, Timothy Garton Ash’s wonderful book entitled History of the Present, published in 1999. In it, Ash writes about the events that had been sweeping Europe during the decade since the disintegration of the Soviet Union late in 1989 and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. This remarkable period, which saw the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the liberation of millions of people, and the terrible conflict in the former Yugoslavia, among so much else, was literally the prime of my life, and yet I have to confess that at the time the things Ash reports in his book were happening, I was often only marginally conscious of them. History of the present? I was in the middle of a mid-life crisis, my kids were small, and I missed much of the drama of my own time, the history of my own present. I was not always at home when life came calling, and I regret it.

I want, as Thoreau also famously said, to be more "awake." I yearn for his "infinite expectation of the dawn." Enough with the excuses: time’s a wasting! We never know how much time we may have, and I want to be there while I can.

This recognition of "time’s winged chariot" hastening near is one of the reasons why I treasure the opportunity to step out of my ordinary routines for some rest and renewal and travel for a few weeks during the summer months. It is a much needed opportunity for me to reconnect with myself and with my own history, to get back in touch with what really matters to me, and to live more in the moment than I am generally able to do.

My colleague John Buehrens, former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has written,

I write in celebration of solitude in summer.

Some would think that winter is the season in which we are most alone. Not true. When most confined by weather, we congregate. Ministers, of all people, know this best. Yet most ministers, in my experience--contrary to their public personae--are introverts. We welcome summer; and not simply for the freedom from writing the weekly sermon.

Introverts (me, and at least half of you), John writes, restore ourselves through "the return to the self," as an essential part of creativity. . . .

Far too often, we "distract ourselves from distraction by distraction," [as T. S. Eliot wrote]. Summer, done well, affords opportunities to turn off the TV, radio, and telephone and actually pay attention, feel, and think reflectively. Even extroverts need chances to ponder and center rather than simply respond to others; to push against the grain of personality, to rebalance in ways that will serve them well in the latter parts of life.

Summer beckons as an opportunity to read, to think, to gather ideas, and simply to let the ground of my being lie fallow, waiting for some good seed to fall upon it. It offers that all important opportunity for some self-assessment, some reorientation, some reflection on where I’ve been and where I’m going. To refill the well, to recharge the battery, to repair what one friend has called "the cracks in my soul."

As I have grown older, it seems more urgent that I do this. Some time ago I reached that point in life where I realized there is less time ahead of me than behind. I would like to be a lot more selective about how I spend my time. I waste too much of it.

There is much in our world to cause despair, and it is easy to succumb to it when one is exhausted both literally and symbolically. The goal is to return re-inspirited. The goal is to remind oneself of the beauty of life, and to forgive oneself for not being able to save the world all by oneself. The goal is to rediscover the sources of courage and fortitude and hope. The goal is to come back in a few weeks, renewed to continue fighting the good fight.

Thoreau expressed it so well:

I wish to begin this summer well; to do something in it worthy of it and of me; to transcend my daily routine and that of my townsmen; to have my immortality now, that it be in the quality of my daily life; to pay the greatest price, the greatest tax, of any man in Concord, and enjoy the most! I will give all I am for my nobility. I will pay all my days for my success. I pray that the life of this spring and summer may lie fair in my memory. May I dare as I have never done! May I persevere as I have never done! May I purify myself anew as with fire and water, soul and body! May my melody not be wanting to the season! May I gird myself to be a hunter of the beautiful, that naught escape me! May I attain a youth never attained! I am eager to report the glory of the universe; may I be worthy to do it; to have got through with regarding human values, so as not to be distracted from regarding divine values.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock