Purpose
Out of the quiet of the last three days before Christmas emerges a sense of purpose, watchful.
What am I for? What is my life for?
Humans can be readily forgiven our confusion over purpose. The majority of life seems consumed by doing rather than being. So as children, we might imagine we have some great destiny saved up for us.
Of course we do, but perhaps not the one that the great epics might have prepared us for.
Yesterday my husband and I were binging series two of His Dark Materials. We have watched all the episodes previously, and since I had avidly read the books years before, I had been keen to introduce him to beloved characters now on the tv screen.
As much as we enjoyed our time together, and some aspects of the show, the emptiness at the heart of both the books and the tv series is clearer and clearer to me. It is intended as a paean to the triumph of humans over the Authority, an atheist’s parody of God, in order truly to achieve free will.
So I still enjoy the idea of the daemons, and various aspects of the show, but for me, the premise is simply wrong: that everything about religion is false and has to be brought down and abolished.
Stories like this, and there are countless thousands of them, help feed the imaginations of children and youths of being the Chosen One, among millions of others set apart for humanity-altering exploits of daring.
Otherwise, what is my life for?
Yesterday was also the winter solstice. The longest night of the year. The quiet provides that extra depth of reflection and contemplation. And the feeling of purpose that arose from it was quite different.
It has nothing of heroism or being the One. It isn’t even, particularly about Doing Things.
Oh, there will be doing of things, no doubt, as long as there is someone here to do them. But that is not what it is about.
I was very struck by how dear humans can be in our gatherings. We walked by the park where a solstice celebration was being held and watched people dancing and chanting in the dark, festooned in lights as they celebrated that after this night, every night will be a little shorter, and every day will have a little more light.
The long nights and the cold are hard on people. We need that reassurance that light and warmth are returning to us, even if we know they will take months to be fully restored, and summer does not have the same innocent joy and delight it had before the climate crisis and the sharp temperature rise.
But there still is a beauty to the snow, and a beauty to human love and connection as we ‘walk each other home’.
And so purpose turns out to be bound closely with presence, being with, and love.
I do not ask to see the distant scene
One step enough, enough for me.
The artist, Ken Medema, has been visually impaired since birth, unable to see anything at all besides the shifts of light to darkness and indistinct shapes of large objects. He has throughout his musical career engaged head on with the ironies of singing or speaking about seeing. And who is to say that he doesn’t see more clearly than many so-called sighted people?
I couldn’t help but notice that he and his wife have been married as long as I have been alive. All those years of being there for each other, and giving their lives in service to God.
Another winter day begins, a little brighter than yesterday, a little closer to Christmas, a little nearer to the light.
I listen to the gentle morning sounds and think of how good it is to be alive in this world, to have this purpose to fulfill.