Chasing the Past

As I write this I’m sitting in the dining room of my parent’s home in Texas. It is a long way from home to come back home. I appreciate the way that distance both warms memory of the past and removes the rough edges of what is real. And I guess many have the experience of nearness scattering the fuzziness of memory and rendering what is as so disturbingly real that it can actually change a man.

I was driving my mother around in the stunningly hot Texas weather, running errands with her. We stopped at the blessedly cool mall to return some items. As we walked the brightly lit, uncannily cool halls of excess she grabbed my arm. “Sometimes these shoes stick to the floor,” she said. I flashed to my grandmother doing the same thing: grabbing my arm for balance.

In that moment the image of my own mother as ageless – more or less the same now as she was when she bore me in her youth – once again disappeared. She is a woman of 79. My own grandmother was something like 89 when she died. My mother is going to die, but first she is going to grow old and feeble. And I, her now middle-aged son, is supporting her on a stroll through an artificially cooled mall in the tormenting Texas heat.

What I recall about a place, or a person, or a thing puts me into a certain sort of relationship not only to that other, but also to myself. I must change my self-knowledge as I come to know what is real. I must change in order to receive what is real.

This is the first rule of the spiritual life: in order to know God we must change. I can’t grow in the life of the Spirit without accepting that the promise of God is real and that it is drawing me into the one place that I cannot control: the future. I only get my self when I am willing to let myself go, when I am willing to let the vast Other take me.

There are things in the spiritual life that I think that I want, but discover that I don’t really want. I love the idea of these things – wisdom, mercy, power – but I love the idea of them on my own terms, according to my own definitions. Each of these spiritual gifts comes to me with a requirement to change. And the change will always bend me to the point that I fear I will simply break in two. But it is what I want, this bending almost to breaking.

I can no more grow in the life of the Spirit based in my own power than I can keep time from moving forward around me. What I get is not what I want, but what I need to move forward in the life of God. It would be so much easier if I were God. But what a limited god I would make.