2015 begins . . .

I seem to be very spotty in writing here.  But perhaps that's OK.

At the end of 2015, I lost my mom.  I've written a post on Facebook about this.  In it, I quoted some lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (East Coker) that resonated with my 45-year-old self but that didn't so much register to my 22-year-old self when I first read the poem:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Losing a loved one in particular - especially one's mother - certainly leads to more thoughts about mortality and the way the universe and time continue unrelenting.  

I am also reading a book by Richard B. Hayes called "The Moral Vision of the New Testament."  . . .  And in the current mood, I read his description of St. Paul's vision as Mr. Hayes saw it - which I would summarize as being that we are living in a time where the New World created by Jesus Christ has broken through the Old World - yet we remain in an "in between" time.  We are already a new creation in Jesus Christ, yet we still live in the current world - in expectation of the full Parousia to come.

In my own thinking about this paradox - the New Creation having begun but still awaiting the full Parousia of Jesus the Christ - I have thought much about how each of us has but one lifetime to live in that expectation.  While the objective years have stretched out - with us now entering the 21st century after the Death, Resurrection, and Ascension - yet each of the Christians over that entire period have lived only one life each - whether it be long or short.  None of us is really any different than the saints of old listed in Hebrews 11 - the "so great a cloud of witnesses."  They lived in the expectation of the Messiah: we live in expectation of the Parousia.   And it has been that way since the time of St. Paul to the present - yet no individual in all that time has had more than one human lifetime to live in expectation.

When we were holding mom's hand, and listening to her last breath . . . And when we prayed, commending her to God . . .  We were part of the same chain of witnesses that has been looking forward in expectation for these many centuries.  And yet . . . . For Mom - she had 76 years on this Earth - not 21 centuries.  It really was "a lifetime burning" in that moment - and not the lifetime of her only.