2023-10-20 A Meditation on Stages of Life
“12 And the manna ceased the day after they ate of the produce of the land. And there was no longer manna for the people of Israel, but they ate of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.” (Jos 5:11–12 ESV)
“16 And the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. 2 He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ 3 And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. 4 An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed.” (Mt 16:1–4 ESV)
The stages of life take us through some rather harrowing changes: Israel lived on manna until one day they arrived and the manna stopped. That is, strong is the man, the woman, to hunker down and fight. To make do, on the solo tip or in small fellowship. But likewise we get antsy when we have arrived and the manna, the subsistence living, stops. Suddenly we cease with the deprivations, and long for added effects, pleasantries, those things that long consecration unto the task of war did wean us from.
Stoking the hearth, life throws at us recollections, similitudes, to a family hearth, a national interest, a sought-out peacetime; we make haste and we persevere, with that boon untold or that prize unburied. The jewel, the ringlet, the earring and necklace; suddenly more three-dimensionality presents itself; yet soldiers we were, and soldiers we are; to take shelter; to bivy in place; to hasten to the reliquary of mementos, of recollections, of the multiple times and moments where silence was our promise to one another, rather than the love letters and the pick-me-ups, the pastoral missives of untold count, myriad and multiple.
Just breaching the wide divide between safety measures, protective habits, is a call unto wakefulness, the end of the blank stare and the prize money won. Some things call for haste. To reassure. To see another put themselves out there, and we… acting dumb or rote or routine. Therefore to fight is to cage-master, to cage fight the right to have those stages of life. It is the right to wow ourselves at how we “make do”, yet too how we are no less eager and ready to enter the warmer climes, the duty to those near to us even as we fight on as those called and set apart, consecrated and prayed over. We more than handle the myriad personalities, a few gladsome alliances and more, treaties and alignments.
Some we lose, but we never lose the formative years, the formative friendships, that have educated us, that have matured us, that have brought us to the moment of emergence into the light of day. From a nurturing place. From a gentle motherly and fatherly embrace or steadfast hold on us even as we, blessed, do fight on. We are in that womb called parental love, which holds close even to the soldier strong and brave, radical and mature. And which consists of simple signs, apologies in season, reassurances that as the days and weeks and months go by, that no affection was imagined, that no emergent hearth was trampled on, that professionalism was the key to the locket of additive, beneficial, camaraderies: we are professional as soldiers to the platoon, to others, because such evocative pride carries a gauntlet scarcely understood, holy, mysterious, worked over by faith. And that same faith that has fled, so as to self-preserve and protect, so as to make our goodbyes solemn, for they are a form of mourning early life, and our hellos gladsome, for they have healed where there was so much about life that as yet was uncertain.