Imitations of Immortality

There are some things in life which can make a person feel his own mortality to a painful degree. Saying goodbye is one instance I’ve noticed it. You stand and look at the person across from you, or what passes for the person in this world, and you think, I have thirty seconds more to look at this face; twenty-eight now. And you think how you want time to stop, just for a moment, just so you can make this last, and don’t have to come to the inevitability of the last moment, the turning-around-and-walking-away. But you can’t; you try to think how to hold on to those moments, and eventually your twenty-eight seconds are gone and you haven’t said anything, and you shake your head and shrug and nod. And you are utterly helpless, utterly at the mercy of the march of the sun across the sky, and you turn around and go.

And when you’re leaving a place, you think of all the things you wish you had done differently; the times you rolled over in bed because you were too lazy to get up, the times you thought you should talk to someone but didn’t know what to say, and walked on by yourself. You imagine your actions differently over and over again, trying to make them different, but in the end, you know: you can’t.

And when you’re coming to a place, and you see folks you haven’t seen in a long time, and it comes over you all of a sudden that they’re not the way you remember them, they look old, and you look at yourself and realize you’re not the person you were; you’re old too. And a tightness comes over you when you realize how different from that person you are, the person who had the same name, and connections as yourself, but whose fears and delights were so foreign to those you’ve had for a long time; and you weep a bit for the person who is gone and can never come again.

Sometimes you forget about your helplessness, and think nothing bad can ever happen to you, you’re too smart to let it. You think that life was made for you to live, and the continuing existence of the world is tied up with the continuing well-being of your own person. Everyone naturally wants to be your friend.

And then maybe you hit some kind of a glitch, where things aren’t all right no matter how much you insist they have to be. And it comes to you, suddenly, when your car is spinning out of control and it’s too late to stop it, that maybe not everything had to be okay for you after all. Maybe people will cry a little, and shake their heads and say, what a pity, and then go right back to their business, just as if it had nothing to do with you. Maybe they think life is about them, instead.

Or you sit on the porch in the summer when the power is out and listen to the rain pounding down around you, and watch the lightning chasing the thunder across the sky, and you know you are small and damp. You know that magnificence, that unharnessed power has nothing to do with you, and could consume you in a flash.

But sometimes you know that there is a Power behind that, a Power that is the meaning which you are not. A Power in control not only of the mere universe, with its laws of space and time marching on, but outside and above that. A Power to Whom the nations are as a drop in the bucket. A Power that is the reason there is a person behind the mask the world sees.

And then maybe, if you are right in your mind, you realize that this Power made you in His image, that He became flesh and dwelt among us, that He humbled Himself and became obedient even to death on a cross, that He adopted you as His child. And you remember that He has promised to be with you wherever you go, and give to His beloved, even in your sleep. You have not come to a mountain that cannot be touched, but to the city of the living God.

And then you whisper to Him Who Was, and Is, and Is to Come, Who can hear you through the noise of the rain and the thunder and your own whispering, "through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness."