The Emergence of a New Constant
O Lover,
It goes by many names: flux, transitoriness, effemorality, change. Growing awareness of its pervasiveness first disturbed my heretofore patterned life via education, then life experience, the creative arts, both subatomic- and astro-physics, recent political developments, and aging/mortality. The credibility of the adage of Heraclitus (5th Century BCE)—“One cannot step twice into the same river”—grew across my entire lifespan. The tension between being and becoming, the static and the evolving, seemed to lean increasingly toward the latter.
At the same time, this growing awareness of the comprehensiveness of change was serving to sharpen the thirst for that which transcends flux. I experienced a yearning for a trustworthy constant within which proliferation and change, the fluidity of the river, are held. This thirst for me has been and remains existential and thus a matter of urgency. The longing I am writing about is not principally for something grounded in reason, sacred text, creed, theology, ecclesial institution, or emotional state, all of which I had found in the second half of my life to be, not unlike everything else, assaulted by flux and fluidity. I longed to experience Reality, at least episodically, in as direct, unmediated, and comprehensive a manner as is possible. In my octogenarity I am experiencing emerging fulfillment of that desire in two critically important and simultaneous respects, both mediated via deeper and richer levels of awareness of the impact of Jesus the Christ.
The first of these, O Lover, involves my awareness of Your presence. I have experienced reason, authority, and emotion to be inadequate indicators of Your ubiquity. The siren of feeling has been particularly seductive repeatedly baiting me in dark times to concede to the notion of Your absence. This is tough terrain for one prone to mood swings. Amid this vulnerability I have been shown an expanding vision of You as mediated via Your Christ, Immanuel (“[You] with us” [Mt 1:23]). You, the unnamed and unnameable, have—Voilà!— self-named, and this precisely in terms of unconditional, irrevocable and unfailing presence! And this “showing,” spoken by You in humanese (Jn 1:14), has elicited my “yes!” in a manner unreached by argument, authority, or, yes, feeling. I am sinking into growing awareness of Your presence, and this is becoming a new constant in the autumn of my life.
A second dimension of an emerging constant involves Your disposition toward Your handiwork. Granted You are incorrigibly ubiquitous, ever present, but is that good news rather than ill? Are You present as the extravagantly Loving Father (Lk 15:11-32) rather than the judgmental and angry god of Jonathan Edwards or one who does deity by whim and caprice? In short, are You Lover and not Diábolos? Does Your heart continue to self-disclose—definitively and trustworthily albeit not exhaustively—via the embodiment, life, teachings, death and resurrection of the one St. Paul cites as Your eíkon (II Cor 4:4, Col 1:15)? Is the Anointed One a window into You as lavish and extravagant Lover who is Reality Itself rather than mere being among beings? Here again I have sought in recent years to mount my largest possible “yes!” to these questions, a “yes!” which is also part of an emerging constant in my time of ripeness.
A final question remains having to do with how I am holding the above two-fold emergence. The term “constant” warns of presumption, indeed danger, for me, one whose second half of life has schooled him in seeing “through a glass darkly” (I Cor 13:12) at best. That glass will remain intact for the duration of this life. Yet . . . yet before You, O Lover, I must acknowledge that in these years I am fretting less about Your (perceived) absence or how Your eíkon’s window into You correlates with the planet’s present crises. Your Christic M.O. has captivated me, my agency compromised, yet without complaint. Even during seasons when my desire for You flags, when I seemingly do not want You, I am nevertheless learning to my surprise that I always at least want to want You! I am settling into what I have described above as an “emerging constant,” that, with a nod to Rex Harrison, I’m slowly becoming accustomed to Your face, You whom I name as Lover. Yes, a trekker on the long and winding road toward the “face to face” (13:12) horizon of the Beatific. And for now, welcomed by You at precisely where I am on that journey.
