“Healing.”

H,

That is where the problem begins. We think that the healing of God is some sort of magic trick over our problems. We expect to close our eyes and then open them and then have no more problems. We think there is an instant cure for the fractured human soul. The instant cure is a lobotomy. The true cure is a step into eternity.

This is the strength of a soul that lives forever. We can walk through all the things we want to run past. There is no cowardice in the God-life. We walk slowly and surely along our path of salvation and grace and love and faith. We take some steps forward and several steps back but it is all part of going through everything and avoiding nothing.

The sound of choir music and slick pastoring cannot be anything but a plaster on the deep wound of present humanity. Nowadays it is even barely that. The wound festers underneath. It does not heal by fantasy or the arcane grasps at success. The poor, the rich, the successful, the unsuccessful, the living life to the fullest, the dying, the enlightened, the unenlightened, the high and the low all have to face the huge feeling of ennui with day to day life without the medicine of the moment or the cure for all time.

The medicine of the moment is the thing we are presently chasing. It makes life meaningful as long as we are chasing it. It can be the first lover you ever have or climate change. It is big within your line of vision and its fulfilment will make everything better. It is the cost of living on earth: having a commitment to something real, that you can track and weigh and measure. It has no use outside this present state of things and it is somewhat better if it there is no God and no reality outside the material. Dust and dust and nothing else. Life is the meaning you give to it. It is absurd, as the philosopher wisely said, but this is all we have evidence of so let us live under the relative calm of earth and earth only. It is scant consolation and amazingly arrogant but it is a way to plaster over the cracks and not fall into oblivion.

The cure for all times makes the idea of eternity the centre of existence. It makes all the details of your life a chapter in the much larger book of life and everything else. It tells us healing is certain in the light of God. It says today is the day of salvation. It calls us into God because we cannot see past our narrow view of what life is and then into what life can be.

 Answer that call. Choose not just life but what life can be.