Borrowed Time
February 26, 2009
Last night as I watched my daughter receive ashes on her forehead, it hit me. We are all on borrowed time. My daughter is not “mine.” She belongs to God and He can take her whenever and however He chooses. It is very humbling.
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“She belongs to God and He can take her whenever and however he chooses.”
Well-said.
However, I doubt I could ever have the courage to think likewise once thrusted in that immediate situation.
Most likely, and more realistically once in those circumstances, how I would like to act and how I actually do in that very moment becomes 2 entirely different things.
Well said RCM. I have that thought about my little one which, for me, is heightened by the fact he has down syndrome. This condition seems to be a constant reminder of distance; I like to imagine that a great part of him “stayed behind” so to speak.
But could one not also say: he belongs to God precisely because he has been entrusted to my love, and not in spite of it. Or that somehow his belonging to God is in fact a belonging to the love I give him? I guess I wonder about the need for settling on an equivocal understanding of God’s otherness.
Don’t get me wrong – God’s otherness is unquestionable. But might it not be that the otherness of God is so absolutely other that it is the only ‘otherness’ that enters into identity with us; God’s otherness overflows into the deepest of intimacy (as Auqustine so eloquently noted time and again).
So those “gifts” over which I am entrusted by God are all the more “mine” in belonging more fully to God, and belong more fully to God in being brought more deeply into my love.
I suppose that’s not so different from your insight, though.
Thanks for the thought.
If I remember correctly, C. S. Lewis, writing in A Grief Observed, seemed to have little use for the idea that he would be reunited with his wife in the next life (although he clearly did believe there was a next life). Or maybe he just got little comfort from the idea. I don’t know that there is much authoritative Catholic teaching on what an afterlife will be like, so I don’t know if Lewis’s speculation is in line with Catholic thought. In any case, if time on earth is all the time we have with our loved ones, it makes thoughts like these all the more poignant.
Your post reminds me of the chapter on Children in Kahlil Gibran’s book, The Prophet. Here is what he says”
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of Children.”
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Having lost my older brother last Fall, all I can say is, now is the time to show your love for those you love. They can be taken away in a flash.
Thanks, RCM.