Lent - Companions on a Hero Journey

I began this blog because I found myself on a journey that might end in sudden death. Sounds dramatic. It was. In mid-November my new doctor had called me to come in and review the results of the previous week’s stress test, and everything changed. He said that a bulge on the side of my aorta leading from my heart could rupture if I was not careful. He said I was lucky we caught this early. He said that this would have been a game-changer if we had not caught it. He said to be a slug. Everything changed, as I returned home stripped of the illusion of tomorrow, and I found the gift of today. I saw Kathy clearly, felt my love for her without inhibition, and expressed it. I knew my life’s treasure. Life with children, grandchildren, and friends had a certain sharpness and clarity. Since I felt responsible to stay alive for them, I followed my doctor’s direction scrupulously: I was a slug. As we learned more about my aneurism from my cardiologist, we began to understand that sudden death was not likely an issue, but that its location and early detection required a careful analysis of the best approach to repair. I was free to engage in limited exertion: use a snow blower, but don’t shovel; lift no more than twenty pounds – make that 10. Walk on the tread mill, but don’t set it on a heavy workout. It is now three months from the discovery of that aneurism.

Did you ever wonder why in heaven’s name ancient cultures would sacrifice humans to a volcano? They had an existential awe at the idea of this nexus, this connection of inner-ness and outer-ness, this place where membrane that separates the cool, firm, outer world from the fiery, molten inner world was penetrated. It was a secret door into another world. They did not understand the phenomenon scientifically, they gave it a sacredness, ascribed to it a holiness, a mystery. Those sacrificed were sent not to death, but into mystery, into the “other world”, and idea included in most cultures, like our own “heaven”. And don’t we talk about someone being “at death’s door”? While I anticipate open-heart surgery, perhaps months from now, perhaps sooner, I know that this dance on the rim of the caldera blesses me with insight, and I also admit that the clarity of my living waxes and wanes with the heat and the smell of sulphur. I observe that I’m best in this world when I’m at the doorway to the other.

The season of Lent, while practiced by Christians, is an opportunity for all of us to approach death’s door not in terror, but in awe, not as a candle that draws the moth in us, but as this nexus between the here-and-not-here that calls us here. The door is Jesus, a man who is recorded in Roman records as living 200 years ago. All of us are free to look at the real, historical Jesus regardless of whether we call him the Christ, the anointed one of God, the son of God, the Messiah. As with other epics, we have the opportunity to take a hero journey with him, as he lives, approaches death, dies, rises, and becomes Spirit.

This blog began as a way of cherishing and sharing my life on a journey, my life lived with intensity and clarity by the uninvited grace of threat. Join me daily or from time to time on this path toward the path of Jesus for these forty days. I do not know the way. But in that week of brightest illumination when I thought my life might quickly end, I knew from moment to moment the best way to spend the time I had. I discovered what importance was. I am formed most of all by the love of my wife, and of our children who are in many ways the incarnation of her love. But I am formed next by the life and example of this Jesus, who calls me not to himself, but to Kathy, and our children, and others.

Let’s see what we can learn about life by companioning Jesus, the nexus of holiness and humanity.  Please join, whether our hero is stranger to you or friend, God or not.  I’ve pulled off the previous posts, so we can focus on this.

Tomorrow - Sleeping with Bread

FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.