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| Photograph by George Angus |
“I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love.” Rainer Maria Rilke
I pray that you may have your roots and foundation in love, so that you, together with all God's people, may have the power to understand how broad and long, how high and deep, is Christ's love. Yes, may you come to know his love - although it can never be fully known - and so be completely filled with the very nature of God.
Eph 3:17-19 (Good News Bible)
“The amazing premise of Christian mysticism is that, when God loves you, he transforms you into love; when God loves you, he gives the fullness of his Divinity to you and, through you, back to God and to others and, indeed, to all creation. When you are called to partake of the divine nature, you are called to be loved, to love, and to be love. You thereby join in the most amazing of cosmic dances, a dance of joy and fullness, of healing and restoration, of light and rest and delight, that will give you the entire cosmos forever and ever.”
Carl McColman
1 January 2016, 06h00
Early morning on New Year’s Day 2016. I am sitting in our bedroom writing in my journal. A faint noise is coming from the pantry next door. Difficult to determine what exactly the source is, but by the sound of it Patat is trying to help himself to the cat food directly from the bag. And he’s adamant, judging by the persistent rustling sound.
I stand up to see what is going on. He is sitting on the floor, a little distance away from a young Rock Thrush that he has caught. I can see that the little bird is very badly injured, even though it is still flapping its wings. On picking it up I gently wrap it in the seam of my T-shirt and return to my journal writing. Patat can’t understand where his prey has gone to and walks around searching, talking softly in short utterances as he makes a round through our room as well and walks across my journal, smudging letters. He leaves none the wiser.
Through the loose folds of my T-shirt against my stomach I can feel wild fluttering and spasms and then it is quiet, with only the little heap of heat against my skin remaining.
Strange that I have this very intimate experience with death at first light at the very beginning of a new year.
I could see it as a sign to take my place amidst the many voices that have pondered the meaning of life and death through the ages and try to make a huge difference with my monumental philosophical contribution. I have all the material here in my lap should I want to think of the temporary and fleeting nature of things and how some lives come to an end even before they have started. Paradox can set the tone of my thoughts: that something that we love so much and is so cute like Patat constantly carry the ability to kill with him.
Previously the death of the little bird would have upset me very much. Now I do not see death so much as foreign or cruel (even though it can have these characteristics as well), but as an integral part of life and Being itself. Nothing gets lost but is taken up in the much larger whole of which we who live are an integral part. It is just as if I am more conscious of the immensity of everything and everything’s place in it all.
The honest truth however, is that I actually understand very little. I am merely sitting and writing in the Big Love, holding a little dead bird in my lap here on the first day of a new year. There is a deep knowing that this rush of tenderness and compassion that I experience looking at the fragile little bundle of feathers, is but a mere shimmering of what the ultimate Being who is Love, feels towards me. And rolled up in that T-shirt I can live and even try to manage the other days to follow this one.
George
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