When change becomes a nightmare

This life is transitory!   This is an unshakable truth.  History, however is not short of fools, who, at a certain point in life were convinced that they could bring to a stand still the divine clock of time, bring to a halt the move of the wind and the flow of rivers.  Since time immemorial, rivers have been going to the sea, yet never does the sea become full, to the place where they go, the rivers keep going’.  Such is the order of things.

The worst of these idiots believed they could manipulate this order that it may leave them unscratched.  It is a madman’s desire.  100% total idiocy! 

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth.  Ecclesiastes 1:2.  Fool of fools.

‘The fool folds his arms and consumes his own flesh.’  Better is one handful with tranquility, than two with toil and a chase after wind!  Ecclesiastes 4:5-6.

When a man wants to conquer change, he gets consumed by it even faster and miserably so.  Change is very intimate to us all.  We face it in the mirror everyday, and its beauty, like that of a sea, is in the wrinkles.  Counting the years, knowing wisdom is piling by.  We become both the past and the future embracing each other in the now’, whose continuance we must safeguard by allowing change.  We understand, as we count the years, the place of pain in the making of our joy.  When we do that, we heap our affections on what matters the most.

Better is one handful with tranquility! 

But when do I grow so fearful and agitated when what I hold is about to slip away?  When I had gotten so carried away that I lost touch with my creaturehood.  When I got so neck-deep in power-madness that I forgot there is something called accountability’.  That someday I may be asked to give an account of my actions, even on this earth, before mortal men.  Change from the status quo becomes a real nightmare if I had made myself the beginning and the end of the universe.

Joan Chittister makes it very clear, It’s when I am protecting the territory that is my godhead that I find myself mired in misery, hopelessly lost, sick with the struggles of life.

Our daily confession of the creed, I believe in God, the Creator… confesses much more about me, than the Creator I believe in.  I believe that I am not God.  When I loose sense of that truth, I grow fearful when the truth finally comes to settle in the sunset of my power-honeymoon.  I had once believed I must give instructions to everyone, and now everyone seems to be asking why?  I had believed I am their redeemer, and now they seem to be seeking a successive redemption, a course that questions my relevance.  I then begin to grapple the forces of change and pronounce hell on everyone who believes anything other than what I believe.  It is a vain struggle, for fear is my only source of energy. 

The forces of change sound a death knell on him who sits on the throne of skulls, for every bone seems to regroup, to give a terrible testimony.  Every night is a bitter struggle with conscience that call you to creaturehood, to learn that you are incomplete, admit that there are things you do not know, realize that there are situations you do not understand and that dealing with things you have not done well constitutes one of the rudimentary shocks of creaturehood, as Joan Chittister frankly puts it.

And when the sky shuts its eye, the place where you seek comfort becomes a brewery for more nightmares.  Every good night’ from your sweetheart sounds like rest in peace’ .  In the shadow of the earth, you wonder who is the enemy, who is a friend.  You distrust your own image in the mirror, you hate the wrinkles which you ought to be proud of.

Day in, day out, the forces of justice are calling you to accountability, As for you…!  Did you want to lift yourself to heaven?  You will be thrown down to hell!  Luke 10:15.

As long as the rivers continue to flow in the traditional direction, every generation must give birth to the next.  It is a give and take love cycle that never dies, like the miracle of a raindrop.  You fight it you fight yourself.

Each drop of rain has meaning in itself and gains more in life when it joins other drops of rain,  writes Chi Chiazzo, Although it falls in droplets, only in love with others can a river be born.  The river joins the sea.  The sea gives back to heaven what it received, in a mysterious understanding

You cannot stop the birth of a child whose time is come.  It is a divine decree that keeps the generation of mankind going, this kind that must renew itself over and over again, on this wonderful planet where only change is young forever.