Sabbath Messages > Sabbath Message: December 10, 2005
Good Sabbath
December 10, 2005
Racing towards 2006, how fleeting the feet of Father Time. It was so short a time ago that I levitated up the stairs of Cedars to see my first-born son, Steve. I knew or felt that I was the only father of a new-born alive. The mind is superbly equipped to rationalize any emotion, to believe any notion, to fear any possibility, no matter how remote.
"All extremes are error. The reverse of error is not truth, but error still. Truth lies between these extremes." (Cecil) "We often pretend to fear what we really despise and more often to despise what we really fear." (Colton)
In the Wall Street Journal: (12/12)"Fear and greed are supposed to be what drives up the stock market, but as the year finishes up, it often seems like fear and more fear."
Here we were at Cal Poly, to celebrate the daughter of that son, our granddaughter Kelly and her significant other and his family, a celebration of new found-love and potential expanded family. The formality of graduation was punctuated with the grads on cell-phones, waving to people they had but just left, wearing caps with personal ditties and witticisms on the top, some with shorts under their cap and gowns, all races and nationalities sharing the extremes of education and graduation, new friends in a fearful world-not a word about Iraq-commandments to keep changing thyself and thy world for "you are our latest generation of hope."
There were no backs on the bleachers so the spine was challenged and soreness tried to fight the excitement of seeing your granddaughter in cap and gown--grown up and still so young and innocent, for with innocence there is the chance that new discoveries would outpace fear.
"Great is the person who has not lost his childlike heart." (Mencius 371 BC))
"We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to realize that it is God who is shaking them." (Charles West)
The headline reads, "Uncertainty is certain next year." Many decades ago, Seneca told us: "all that lies between the cradle and the grave is uncertainty" When I watched Kelly and her friends, feeling no fear of tomorrow's uncertainties, spreading a cloak of optimism over parents and fully-grown adults, I knew that they had just a few moments of this before life's realities would bend their enthusiasm, for Fate makes and breaks spirits and that seems his only task.
Yet , as a teacher and mentor of many college students, I have to guide them into a pathway of optimistic reality and unquenchable curiosity so that they explore every rock and mound to see what lies below, as they invent new reasons to have faith in their friends and themselves.
Foolishness and faith are related, for we look at faith as an extreme to be doubted when it becomes extreme, and to propel us when we need its nourishment. We must never run out of patience when we are down and exhausted from apparent failure and disappointment.
"They can because they think they can." (Virgil)
"If you can dream it, you can do it. (Walt Disney)
I heard the speeches of the adults, the deans, the elder states-people, prodding, pleading, sharing their own past disappointments--hoping that the kids were listening in between cell-calls; frequently they listed their own losses of a child, a loved one, a dream--but the young do not understand any thing of mortality otherwise they could not face tomorrows and the harvest of pain and doubt in between wisdom and comprehension.
As youth constructs soul it finds the raw material out of which rises that eternal creation: heartache, bliss, pain, ecstasy, love and deeper love. When one's mind and heart write poetry together, then soul rises out of mere words or lilting music, and stars brighten into sparkling objects of aspiration and fulfillment. I believe that truth comes from love of God or life-partner. I leave that to the young so that they can inherit the possibilities with which God gifts them.
sandy
