So on Friday I’m doing the New Years day thing (sitting on my rear-end flipping between college football games and “best of 2009” programs) and thinking about New Years resolutions. I’m thinking: “New Years resolutions are sorta passé, you know? They’re so 2009.” But then an interview of author Gore Vidal on the Charlie Rose show catches my attention. I appreciate and respect both Vidal and Rose very much – not for what they stand for per se, but for their large brains. Anyway, Vidal is now in his mid-80’s and Rose asked him if he had planned for his funeral – if he thought about death – if he was ready to die. Vidal’s response was interesting: “I know its over, and I think it’s really about time, you know. Eighty-four is not the beginning of a new page…(but) I don’t know if anybody’s ready,” he said hesitating, “I mean…if there were anything up ahead…”
Rose interrupted him and they traded jokes to break the inevitable tension that the “D-word” always brings, so I’m not sure what – specifically – Vidal was referring to. But it seemed to me that he was saying something to the effect that if there were still something left ahead of him in life – another major writing project, etc…then he would not be ready to die. But there was nothing left for him to do, so…he was, in fact, ready.
Isn’t this how we live? For the next thing that we are going to do. The next hobby, the next vacation, the next project, the next holiday, the next relationship, the next chapter…the next page. And by doing so, we miss today entirely. C.S. Lewis in his brilliant work, The Screwtape Letters, touches on the temptation to live in the future instead of the present (with all of its intimations of the eternal). This is the advice given by Screwtape (an experience agent in the bureaucracy of Hell) to an inexperienced tempter:
Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present…It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time – for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays…
In 2010, I want to live in the eternal rays of the Present. The eternal rays of my daughters – not the “when they grow older we can…” daughters but Story and Annie – right now. In all their 2 ½ and ½ year old glories. The eternal rays of my beautiful wife and our life now. The eternal rays of serving Christ’s church in these days and in this place. And most of all the eternal rays of Christ himself – who is in every day – every hard day, every sweaty day, every freezing day, every joyful day, every boring day, every single today. So, my 2010 resolution is this: To focus on being in today more than worrying about doing tomorrow. To experience the eternal rays of the present.
