A Reflection on the Passages of Life

With my father’s illness and death, the last six months have been eventful.  Yet as  I sit here on this breezy almost-summer day, it all seems to have gone by at a fast-forward pace, leaving so much in the way of life passages and their attendant emotions still to be processed. That is why I look forward to a few months at a slower pace to work my gardens and let Life sink in. 

Perhaps it’s this hurry-up, multitasking world of ours which is the cause of spiritual angst. Spiritual healing requires its own time yet we’re often compelled to “get on with our lives”,  such as resuming responsibilities at  home or work, returning to roles such as parent or employee, and generally keeping pace with a Chronos-driven life – the life of time and externalities of which the soul knows little. 

The soul knows time only in terms of passages: birth, coming of age, living, loving, dying, death. Birth brings in a new light; death creates a void; coming of age brings pain and struggle; loving brings joy and sorrow; and our living forms the font of who we are at our depths. Lived experience is the measure of our souls and if we don’t take the time to grieve, to welcome new life, to grow emotionally, to learn love and pain – if we don’t take the time to let Life sink in, we remain incomplete at our depths and our emotional and spiritual life remains dis-eased. 

My hope is that we can all find a bit of Kairos time for ourselves – time out of time, that is, to let ourselves heal. I hope we can find a sacred space in which to let ourselves be washed over by the pain as well as the joy of life and radically accept all experiences, whether good or bad, as formational to the soul, to the font of who we are, truly and deeply. 

Trust the process; rather than being scarred, the whole of you will be at peace, at ease when, like all things, this too shall pass.