The Trumpet Shall Sound... 
 
Recently, conjoined twins were born to a young woman in London. She was the youngest mother of conjoined twins in the medical records. The first baby girl died shortly after the surgery that separated her from her sister. One of my work mates, a man a few years my junior, just died of an untreatable brain tumor. He was an energetic and apparently fit man in both his home life and in his thirty years as a postman. Until a few weeks ago he seemed to be enjoying vigorous good health, but on his annual holiday he suffered a seizure, the investigation of which turned up the tumor, already at an advanced and untreatable stage. He underwent intensive radiation and chemical therapy despite the terminal prognosis. Last week, on his final day of treatment, he began to have severe respiratory problems as an effect of the treatments. He had to leave the familiarity and solace of his home and family and move into hospital. He’s very near the end of his life. His illness seems to have been barely noticed by his employers of thirty years. His work mates have made a financial contribution to help him and his family weather the immediate distress and demands of his treatment. I hardly know the man, despite having worked in the same office for two years. He‘s neither my friend nor my enemy. Whatever casual opinions (positive or negative) I may have entertained about his character, his sense of humour, his virtues and vices, they now appear in this suddenly broadened context to be ridiculous, utter irrelevant dross. Seeing this clearly, why do I continue to react to my fellows (work mates, friends, antagonists, passers-by, my children, my dearest love, Muslims, Fundamentalist Christians, Jews, politicians, artists, monastics, criminals) with opinions, judgements, doubts, and negativity of all sorts and, perhaps worse, with hopes, expectations and projections that serve neither them nor me? What am I doing?!? When my brief holiday comes suddenly to an end, will I have enjoyed my time with those who shared it here with me? My precious (irreversible, irretrievable, valuable beyond all numbers and quantities and beliefs and doubts, infinitely beyond all passing possessions and securities now proven false) time... The gift of the dying to me, the so-far living, isn’t one of hope or despair. The passing of the beauty and exactness and uniqueness of any form of life is the sound of the last trumpet, and it’s not playing AOR or Favourite Classics or the most exciting avant garde free jazz improvisation or World Music. (Although it can...) It’s sounding reveille - a wake up call - through the dying to the still living me. A call to me to live with attention to the relentless hard necessity of Love.  After the first sister died, the BBC news announced, “Hope has died. Her sister Faith is in intensive care.” Faith died not many days after, unable to live without Hope. After Hope and Faith are gone, what? Old Dogs for Hard Roads
Monday, 8 December 2008