What Passes and What Remains

 ARE WE CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT IS REALLY IMPORTANT IN LIFE?

A Medieval mystic and writer tried to clarify the situation .

At the Day of Judgement, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done; not how eloquently we have spoken, but how holily we have lived. 

The writer continues by raising some interesting questions and examples:

Tell me, where are now all those Masters and Doctors whom you knew so well in their lifetime in the full flower of their learning? 

And he answers his own questions 

Other men now sit in their seats, and they are hardly ever called to mind. In their lifetime they seemed of great account, but now no one speaks of them.”

So wrote Thomas A Kempis in his  IMITATION OF CHRIST.

We mourn when we are reminded of our own fates by the death of a friend or loved one. Who are we grieving for?

W. H. Auden expressed his grief  in his poem “Funeral Blues,” which ends with these lines:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. [1]

There’s a part of each of us that feels and speaks that sadness. Not every day, thank goodness. But if we’re willing to feel and participate in the pain of the world, part of us will suffer that kind of despair.

 If we want to walk with Job, with Jesus, and in solidarity with much of the world, we must allow grace to lead us there as the events of life show themselves. I believe this is exactly what we mean by conformity to Christ.

We must go through the stages of feeling, not only the last death but all the earlier little (and not-so-little) deaths. If we bypass these emotional stages by easy answers, all they do is take a deeper form of disguise and come out in another way. 

Many people learn the hard way—by getting ulcers, by all kinds of internal diseases, depression, addictions, irritability, and misdirected anger—because they refuse to let their emotions run their course or to find some appropriate place to share them.

Hopkins is another poet who  confronts the source of all our sorrow :

Spring and Fall 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

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