[Oe List ...] Earthrise @ 79

[John Epps]

*Earthrise @ 79*

Recently we were returning from a trip to Kansas and stopped for lunch at
Denny’s in Limon, Colorado. We’d been watching storm clouds gathering on
the horizon and were hoping to make it home before they hit. As we were
leaving, I held the door for an obviously elderly couple – both were
white-haired, somewhat bent-over, and he had a cane. Walking was a chore
and pushing open the door would have taxed their capacities. They could
obviously use some help, so I pushed open the door and held it as they
struggled through. Then they uttered the words that still jar me: “Thank
you, sir.” “Sir?” Coming from them? I was taught to use that term to refer
to those older than I. That statement occasioned an interior rainstorm of
reflections, including lots of wind, rain, and some hail.

Looking back over the last month, I’ve had more “sirs” thrown at me than at
my senior year at The Citadel. There it was earned, deserved, and welcomed.
Here it’s a surprising address heralding the onset of elder-ness that I
didn’t think I had earned (yet) or deserved, and certainly not welcomed.
There are plenty of signs, from the number of medications it takes to keep
going to the diminishing energy and frequent naps. But I have ignored those
as simply the afflictions of a young man with something gone wrong (to use
a phrase from JWM).

Reality will not be denied. It breaks through our facades.

This time it drove me to look at a work I’d heard about but never examined:
“On Holy Living and Dying” by Jeremy Taylor published in 1839 (a century
before my birth). I turned quickly to the section on Holy Dying. Here’s an
excerpt. “A person is a bubble…all the world is a storm, and people rise up
in their several generations…like bubbles descending from nature and
Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first
parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in
the world but to be born, that they may be able to die: others float up and
down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to
others: and those that live longest in the face of the waters, are in
perpetual motion, restless and uneasy; and being crushed with the great
drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being
great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was
before. So is everyone….”

This goes on for 10 pages with powerful images and the same message about
our relative insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things. Somehow, and I
don’t know how, I found this strangely comforting, and not unsettling as
one might assume. You just never know where wonder will break through, but
when it does, it’s well worth celebrating.

John Epps
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20180704/d68d40d5/attachment.html>