the threat of becoming...

Can a man’s life be summed up in a matter weeks, days or months? The last 2 weeks of my life, has been so filled with the sublime and beautiful, weaved together with pain and sadness… I experienced the simple kindness of strangers and old friends; celebrated the marriage of my best friends; took in the beauty of my country and culture (it took the fresh ‘seeing’ eyes of my Californian friends to help me perceive KL anew…); wrestled with guilt and pain towards a dear companion…

How could one say there is no meaning in life? Being human is so pregnant with possibilities, feelings, layers of meaning… I find it so hard to take it all in, to streamline or smooth out the rough edges of human experience… to know that each human life is a unique story, lived in the particular, constrained by limitations and contingent events. Our lives are so horribly precarious, a hopelessly beautiful vulnerability… Laughing and crying, feasting and hunger; their place forever dignified (or deified in the terms of Orthodox spirituality) and invested with truthful meaning, through the historically conditioned, precarious life of Jesus of Nazareth… turning water into wine while celebrating a friend’s wedding, his enduring of every trial and temptation imaginable with much tears and cries, and his annihilation on the cross… the wideness and depth of human experience and suffering becomes the wideness and depth of the Father’s mercy and reconciliation…

I am and feel so painfully unfinished…but I do hear him say ‘Become…’.