September 23, 2010
What Was Asked
While in Wal-Mart I ran into a friend who lost her husband last week. Her relief and peace overshadowed any grief that she had and she seemed to be doing remarkably well. “I’m going back to work tomorrow and things really are OK.” She smiled, “Bob was suffering. I decided if you ask God to take someone quickly, then you have no right to have a pity party when He does what you ask Him to do.”
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Gail;
-----I have two friends who lost their husbands in the last few years. One recognized the loss for what it was and adjusted remarkably at that time. The other lost hers a few years ago and is still miserable. Neither lady was very involved in her husband’s responsibilities. But the first moved into them as she saw her husband approaching death; the second ran from them, and continues to seek help from others. Both understood their husbands’ suffering, but the first understood that it required an end; the second only desired his recovery.
-----Death punctuates the nature of our subjection to reality. There is nothing more certain than the fact every living thing will die. Nothing is less certain than when it will occur for each. Its certainty is a call to adjust to the reality of death, both your own and others. The uncertainty is a call to do this sooner than later. And reality itself is key to the adjustment.
-----God gives life, and from our perspective, He takes it away. This is a temporary place in which we live. He also gives love that can be thrown away, but which He does not Himself take away. When love is held, it is not temporary. Love does not demand its own way; it rejoices in what is right. We can not really say that allowing a loved one’s death is right, because when God has arranged it to be so, no one can disallow it. These things are real. What is right is allowing our understanding to fill up with an intersubjective perspective of our loved ones.
-----I know. It isn’t a common term. But it is a simple concept that is the substance of a most common term. Every person has feelings, ideas, thoughts, hopes, ambitions, and ordered perspectives about his own life and the world around him. Every person has the fullness of conscious awareness and holds all that it is in the mind and emotions, complete with its pains, pleasures, sorrows, and joys. Every person perceives all this as personally and as subjectively as you and I do. Intersubjective perspective is simply realizing the deeply personal nature that being alive is to the one who is alive, and respecting the subjectivity of his perspective as much as you respect that your own. It is not synonymous with love; it is rather the fiber which God and circumstance weave by a pattern into a fabric for the tailoring of love.
-----But it is not enough to meet everyone around you, especially those close to you, with intersubjective perspective. For we live in the temporary time where experience can be further limited to only what comes through our physical senses and our logical abilities to make meaning. Yet this place in which we live is far short of all reality. Beyond it is God, who is even more real than are we. So, we must also see Him with intersubjective perspective.
-----That is when the significance of death becomes put into its proper place. Stepping from a short, corrupted reality into an eternal perfect one is a glorious thing. I have longed for the company of some who have died. But I have not hurt for the present circumstances of those who have stepped into His reality. From what they have entered through death, it is they who could languish over the present circumstances of us who have not.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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