defining moment

 


What happens in life, events, a sudden and unexpected Y in front of us like Robert Frost's Road Not Taken, have a way of changing us, no, of "making us" actually, because we are the roads we take and have taken in life. We are the roads others take as well, and everyone else is the roads we take. If it's really big, we may realize a decision's effect in the instant, or we may, as his poem says, reflect on it later and realize that all of life is those moments of decision, indecision, choice, and that, for better or for worse, the rules of Creation do not let us go back to that point in Time and return back here having taken the other road. 

There's nothing profound whatsoever about that observation, which to me is the essence of (Mark 9:1) Jesus' NT Greek word ἴδωσιν, which is, my parsing guide says, verb, aorist subjunctive active third person plural for the root verb ὁράω, where modified by tense and mood it means to have sensed something, to have comprehended, a transition of having grasped an emotional, intellectual, or spiritual truth from having seen or read or heard something in the physical world. This may sound like b - ls- t to whoever may read my blogpost this morning, but I always enjoy the moments in life that bring me back to ἴδωσιν ὁράω my favorite and most helpful word set in Mark's gospel.  

Sometimes one is suddenly happily surprised, like maybe walking into a room and having a crowd you didn't know was there yell "Happy Birthday!!", which my loving congregation did on my 50th birthday more than a third of a century ago (I'm not into surprises like that, but they did love me and it was so reciprocal that I liked it just that once); sometimes a sudden minor sadness brings on the ἴδωσιν ὁράω moment that changes everything at least slightly in some way forever and, as Frost conveys it, you know there's no going back to undo and restore.

It's all of a sense of the ecclesiastical season we're in at the moment, Epiphany - - lightbulbs are supposed to come on over our heads in this moment's cartoon panel. 

Where did all this come from, and where's it going, what's my point? Well, to borrow my favorite line from "Mary Poppins", let me make one thing perfectly clear: I never explain anything. But yesterday I had one of those defining moments that caused me suddenly to decide, I'm not inclined to write a blogpost this morning. Nevermind, it's NOYB. 

Neither am I so inclined this morning, but reading my email I came across, as every morning, Fr Richard's daily meditation and it hit home for me. Surely it's not moral plagiarism if I give him full credit, so I'm copy-and-pasting his blogpost below. What he writes is a metaphor. He expresses my sadness about the nation and the world and personal relationships. The president of China recently said something about "Cold War mentality" that was spot on, right on. The best thing that happened in my lifetime was, in decades following the Cold War, the melting international relationships and developing international industrial and economic interdependence that followed the Cold War such that my computer was made in China, and I could, as I did a couple of times, go online and order caviar from Russia, and for a while I drove a Buick made in Germany, and even still a friend drives a Buick that was made in China, and every other damn thing comes from Japan and Korea and this shirt I'm wearing was made in Indonesia, and the hat we ordered for Malinda was shipped from Ukraine even if it was made in China. Hey! I thought we hated those guys! No, we all have the same interest in living long and peacefully and not sending our children to kill their children so their children have to kill our children. IDK, I think we even had that sort of relationship with Iran for a while. And my loved ones and friends who vote for the other political party, and those whose religious and moral views are so different from mine? 

Every little thing matters: to get down to it, do you ἴδωσιν ὁράω that everything about Creation changed when Betty White died? And when Gina Weller Webb rolled her RV? And as I chased the ambulance from PC to Pensacola those wee hours of darkness in 2018? And a week or so ago as wildfires swept through Boulder County, Colorado? And a couple springtimes ago when a blizzard killed the brood of chicks in that osprey nest I watch online? And, as Fr Richard says, when the red knots found nothing to eat on the Jersey Shore? And when General Lee handed his sword to General Grant? And when Ahmaud was shot and killed? And when Shelley Lynn Thornton was born and lived instead (ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω), and when each Jew murdered in The Holocaust failed to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and when each Japanese child looked at the light and evaporated, and when Derek decided to keep kneeling on Floyd's neck, and on and on and on ad infinitum throughout earth and creature and human history and present. 

IDK, maybe the point is that Nothing Doesn't Matter.

T 

After writing and posting the above blogpost, this morning I finished my book, saving for a couple days before diving into it, "The Eyes in the Trees", the seventh and closing section, which ties back to Genesis, the novel's opening. It has been one of my powerful reads, and I'm grateful, appreciate and am impressed with the intellect that selected it as a Christmas gift for me. In "The Poisonwood Bible", Kingsolver also shows that nothing doesn't matter, even a little white girl from Georgia intentionally stepping on a spider on the floor of a jungle somewhere in Africa may ripple unimaginable and unrealized repercussions in time and space and eternity.