Our Dilemma

I received Rick Bass' new collection of short stories for Christmas...its entitled "The Lives of Rocks." In one of the stories, he tells of a great king who ruled a land justly and with compassion. One day, while walking beside the river, he heard the screams of children who had been swept away in the current. The good king immediately jumped in to save the children; he was able to get them to the bank safely, but he could not save himself. The king went over the falls and his body was torn into pieces. In the days and weeks and months that followed, people of the land would find the king's body parts in different places along the river - an arm here, a leg there, fingers swirling in an eddy. The people reverently carried these parts back to the king's son and daughter to be properly mourned and honored. This presented a great dilemma for the heirs; the kingdom in which they lived contained magic strong enough to put the pieces of the king back together and restore him completely to reign again with justice and compassion. However, they could bury the pieces of the great king and begin to reign themselves justly and with compassion, as the new regents of the land, something they were born to do.

As we step into a new year, something that means so many different things for so many different people, I believe that Bass' story holds great meaning for all of us. We can honor the past so much that we forfeit our own destinies. We can continually be working to put the pieces of something back together, hoping it will come to life again and give us safety or security or happiness or whatever. However, in doing so, we fearfully stay in a place of dependency and never lean into the present, much less the future. The past is to be honored and it holds many pieces that must be mourned, grieved, honored, wrestled with, and learned from. But a slavish attachment to the past, as good as it may have been, keeps us son and daughters, princes and princesses, but not kings and queens. I pray for each of you, as I pray for myself, the courage to reverently honor the past, but at some point to bury those things that would keep us from becoming the ones we were created to be. This is not denial or stuffing down emotions or anything like that; this is letting the past be the past and letting today be today and leaning into tomorrow. It is being alive. And that's what the world needs - people who are alive. Amen.