Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard allowed that life is lived forward but understood backward. Wisdom gained may friend our tomorrows; however, it can only infer from what is over. Still, fresh bearings oriented to heightened discernments may be a true benefit.

Hugh Prather wrote in his “Notes to Myself:”

If I had only… forgotten future greatness and looked at the green things and the buildings and reached out to those around me and smelled the air and ignored the forms and the self-styled obligations and heard the rain on the roof and put my arms around my wife … and it’s not too late.

Prather’s “notes” are suggestive: They argue against our half-lived ordinary lives. Insinuated are missed opportunities for experiencing ourselves, others and our world more deeply, perhaps for failing to notice a whispering that came for you alone, saying there was something lost and waiting beyond now’s too much and, God forgive, you never went. The poet Rilke in his Duino Elegies also wrote of our stunted and uninspiring inner lives:

Yes – the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

But could you accomplish it?

“All this was mission” – what a striking statement! The question “But could you accomplish it?” – that is, were you available to life’s ordinary gifts of intimacy and beauty, attributes of the spirit so essential to the birthing of a nobler self? There is that about our world that wills us to be attentive to the whole of life – life with its magisterial variety and munificence and which insistently addresses us. This invading benevolence of the creation and its occasions challenges any who witlessly would shut themselves away from the splendiferous mystery of God’s presence permeating the moments and circumstances of our lives.

Were it not for my conviction that God has authored this drama of life, so vulnerable to chance’s enigmatic arithmetic but, which in the last must answer to an encompassing and mastering grace assuring me that in the last all shall be well, life simply would be a futile aging into a deepening sadness shorn of all hope. It would be as if I had never heard the Word, which once spoke so graciously: “I am the Way, the Resurrection and the Life” – hearing instead a voice from the depths: “I am the door forever locked, the road which leads nowhere, the lie, the everlasting dark.”

Humankind may forget the origins of its need; still individuals the world over, knowing themselves to be dying men and women, are furiously rummaging through the domains of film, literature and art for clues to the purpose of both their being, their journey and their goal. Similarly, I too plunder favorite poets and authors, frequent landscapes of former times, saunter along country roads, wanting to be nourished by what was and what is, while revisiting in my mind key moments where my life turned one way and not another. Hungrily, I through the years have desired that this wispy geometry of my inner being be magically touched by wonder and awe in the presence of the Unsayable. I want God’s eternal morning to break in me!

The Rev. Merle G. Steva is Minister of Visitation Emeritus at First Church, Saco. He may be contacted at mesteva@maine.rr.com.

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