Reflecting On What Matters After A Tragic Week
The mid-air collision in Washington, D.C. which took the lives of 67 people — including several young figure skaters — followed by the crash in Philadelphia of a medical plane that killed, among others, a little girl who had been in that city to receive life-saving care — is almost too heart-wrenching to bear. Such tragedies remind us of both the preciousness and precariousness of life.
I’ve been reading a book called “The Healing Path” by spirituality writer James Finley, who teaches at Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation. In it, he describes an insight that came to him as he watched his wife take her final breaths:
“When we are born and take in our first breath, God is exhaling (giving us) the gift and the miracle of our very life. We move on in our passage through time sustained by God, inhaling/exhaling, inhaling/exhaling through all of our days. Then when the moment of death finally arrives, we exhale and do not inhale. And in our final exhalation, God inhales us back into the infinite depth of God, which is our true and eternal home.”
I pray that that is how it was for those who perished in the accident in D.C. and those on the plane in Philadelphia.
There is a Japanese expression, Ichi-go ichi-e, which means literally “one time, one meeting.” It is a shorthand reminder to treasure the unrepeatable nature of each moment. Tragedies like the ones we witnessed this past week shake us out of our complacency, force is to remember that our time is limited. They ask of us, how do we want to spend each precious moment? Do we squander those moments on what the great Trappist monk and spiritual teacher Thomas Merton called “useless care,” or do we choose to view what each day brings as gift?
The tragedies of this past week prompted me to think about the people in my life, those whom I care about deeply, and also those who trouble me. Part of that is due to that fact that my husband was traveling to D.C.’s National Airport on a plane that was scheduled to land just minutes after the American Airlines flight collided with aBlack Hawk helicopter. Thanks be to God, his flight was diverted to Dulles International and landed safely there.
The realization that a few moments could have caused a very different outcome for my husband are unbearable to think of. It makes the sorrow over what happened to those 67 souls even deeper.
I found comfort in another passage in James Finley’s book in which he asserts that every experience, even every challenge, grounds us further in the presence of God. He writes:
“I came to realize that, yes, it is true that out here in the midst of the world we are surrounded by all sorts of noise and superficial chatter [and here I would add, tragedies and sorrows] that can intrude upon our sense of inner peace and God’s presence in our lives. But it is also true that we can learn to listen to the sound of the wind and the song of birds and the laughter of children and many other sounds as well that renew our spirits and restore us to a more grounded sense of ourselves in God’s presence.”
Finley goes on to say, “And, then too, there are the words of lovers and poets and the words of those who seek to offer help as best they can, all bearing witness to and embodying God’s oneness with us in life itself.”
As we treat others and ourselves with mercy and conduct our lives with humility, we enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s presence, Finley tells us. He ends one of his chapters with a prayer:
“May we continue on in this true awareness, seeing in each other and every little thing we see, the fullness of God’s presence in our lives. May we learn to be someone in whose presence others are better able to recognize the presence of God in their lives.”
That is my aim as I reflect on the tragic events of the past week.
How can we all be more merciful and interact with more humility? How can we be someone in whose presence others can recognize in their own lives the presence of God?
James Finley will deliver this year’s Fourth and Walnut Lecture sponsored by The International Thomas Merton Society on “Being a Healing Presence in a Wounded and Traumatized World” at Bellarmine University in Louisville on March 18. The talk will be simultaneously livestreamed. The lecture is free and open to the public. To register, please visit: https://merton.org/TWM/default.aspx#FWL
