Broken Angel?

We live in a world full of so much we cannot touch or measure.
Our culture demands both for truth. I don't believe that. Probably many of you don't either. To do so is limited at best and at worst, destructive. Angels are messengers. I am no angel, but I am paying attention.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Buying a House and Dying

We bought a house! That may seem a prosaic observation. Not real philosophic, but this is like my first girl friend. No it's not, it's better. My first girl friend was more a product of my own imagination than real flesh and blood. This place has a front yard and a kitchen and a mortgage.
The process is amazing, offers and counter offers flying through agents. They should be called seconds. They carry our blades and make sure we get to the dueling field on time. (See? I'm out there in my imagination already.) Getting married is easy compared to all the hoops of buy a house.
In some ways that's appropriate. Claiming one another needs no signature, it needs a commitment of spirit. Claiming a property as your own requires a putting down of foundations and roots that have a profound effect on a whole community of people. Maybe we should sign more papers to get married. We'd probably take it more seriously. Who would do the inspections? Anyway, the process of choosing, bidding, signing reorients world order and perspective. That specific part of the map begins to grow in importance.
Here's where death comes in.
In the movie Signs, the main character's wife is pinned agains a tree by a truck. She's basically cut in half, killed, but kept alive by the pressure of the truck, momentarily. Her husband comes to see her and hold her hand as she dies. The movie made me think about the process of dying. Do we desperately try to hold on to the life we've known, the life of wonder and glory that has meant so much to us? Or do we turn in expectation to the unknown that is a whisper away?
One could say it's only fear that keeps us from turning to the new and leaving this, all of this behind. But I think that's cheap. The bonds of affection and appreciation run deep. And we not only grieve for the loss of our own life here, we grieve for the others who are not going with us on the great adventure of life beyond life. No wonder there are tears. They are a mixture of joy and pain, of anxiety and anticipation.
So now here I am, feet on two sides of moments of my life. It will be a while before we leave, years. But the tide is changing. No one else can see it. It runs within me, a tide of the heart. But it is coming.

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