All Things Made New

Well, it’s been a crazy month. I started the month deployed in Europe, finished my first Navy tour, flew home, moved all my things to South Carolina, spent a week in my hometown for the first time since Christmas, and now I’m in the airport in Houston waiting to fly back east to start my new job in my new apartment in my new state.

Discovering the Temporary

One thing that’s been driven home to me this month is just how transient life is. All my worldly possessions can be loaded into a small Uhaul and driven across the country with frighteningly little effort. Everything I have can be moved in a week. And even if I don’t move, the world moves around me. People and things come and go. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes.

Life is such a fleeting thing. I come back to my hometown about every six months, and every time things have changed. The familiar dilapidated buildings are replaced by new shiny structures, and soon those are looking old as well. The babies I remember are children; the children are going to college; the college students are married with kids. The adults I remember are going into nursing homes; those in nursing homes are going into the obituaries.

As a child, I thought that everything was static, stable, secure. Learning responsibility meant learning that things aren’t stable at all, that we have to build that security for ourselves and, to an extent, learn to live without it. But learning wisdom means learning that what we build will inevitably pass away, that whatever is new will before long be old, that when we sing the sun in flight, we also grieve it on its way. Everything is passing. Nothing is permanent; everything is temporary.

Every time I come home I have changed, grown older. My parents have grown older. My grandparents have grown older. We begin to approach that time when every bump and every fall is cause for concern, when every goodbye could be the last. Eventually you see it – the edge that separates this life from the next.

Fluttering on the Edge

People talk about living on the edge, but in truth, we all live on it, dancing like fall leaves still barely attached to the tree. A sudden gust of wind could knock us over into eternity. Life is such a fragile thing. A couple of months ago I was crossing a bridge on my way to church, singing along with the radio, when a biker on the other side of the highway tried to pass a car and hit the curb. He flew about five feet up, flipped over the barrier, and smacked the ground directly in front of the truck ahead of me. We both swerved as hard as we could without going off the bridge. I missed him; the truck didn’t.

How do we deal with this world where everything is fleeting and fragile, where everything is slowly coming to an end? Is the answer to ignore it? To build up a societal myth of constant evolution and progress, a myth that runs directly against the law of nature – specifically the law of entropy – which states unequivocally that everything inevitably falls to pieces? Is the answer to give up on everything, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die? Those are not answers; they are distractions.

Discovering the Permanent

We must look for the permanent things, the unstained things, the immutable things. If you cannot find anything permanent, turn to mathematics, where nothing has disintegrated, where order and symmetry and elegance remain untarnished. Learn from this to look beyond the material universe and find the One, the unchanging goodness and beauty of which Plato and Augustine taught.

But do not stop with ideals, for as Marx told us, if you look behind values and meanings, you will always find personality preceding and producing them. And so it is, for if we look behind our unchanging One, we will find the Unchanging One, the Immutable One of whom the philosophers spoke, not only an ideal, but a person as well.

All Things Made New

It is written: the former things are passing away. That is a deeply tragic thing. This world was made to be good and beautiful and permanent, and much of that goodness and beauty still remains, but it is fading, and it is right to mourn that. The former things are passing away, and I love many of the former things.

But I hold on to the one who does not pass away, in whom there is no shadow of changing, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, he who simply IS. Because he tells us that even as the former things are passing away, he is making all things new. All things. Not just the ‘spiritual’ things, or the abstract things, or the ethereal things. All things. All things are being made new.

And so, fluttering here on the edge, I dance in the wind.

“Woodmoor Sunrise (Feb. 2002)” by TrishN is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0