I have been lucky in my life to have “arrived” in a lot of places: South Africa, India, Europe, Washington, D.C. Each arrival was usually associated with relief because the plane had landed after hours in the air. Perhaps the best arrivals are the ones associated with home. It is always good to be safely home.
As I was thinking about arrivals it dawned on me that for many Christians, their spiritual life is about arriving. In all my years in church, so many sermons were about our guaranteed place in Heaven. I realize many people take great comfort in knowing that their final destination is assured. It always bothered me, though, to realize that I was being taught that what mattered was that I had to be good so I could go to heaven. Only in my later years did I begin to understand that a focus on the arrival meant I missed the entire trip.
On all of those flights, to all of those places, the excitement was about the trip. Only after long hours (once 15 hours in the air) in transit did I begin to relish arriving. I think this is what the spiritual life is about, what Jesus meant when he kept telling his followers to live in the moment. I have discovered that the spiritual life is not about the destination, it is about the journey.
Christians spend so much time worried about their eternal salvation that they fail to live their lives daily. That is where life happens, along the path. I believe that is why Jesus said he was going to prepare a place for us. It frees us to stop worrying about arriving. Richard Rohr talks about the two phases of the spiritual life and I have lived it. Once I began to realize that the destination was assured, I began to look at life differently. And, frankly, those sermons about heaven and salvation and following all of the rules no longer meant anything to me. Sermons and readings about how to live life fully right now, right here mean everything.
I agree with the writer that said true spirituality is the ability to live with ambiguity. Now that is real life. It is ambiguous. There is joy, fear, death, birth, growth, stagnation, failure and success. This is true spirituality, realizing that no matter what happens, the creator of all of life is on the journey with us. Not to protect us from the bad things, but to stand with us and even hold us up when the bad things come.
So, stop worrying about arriving, you already have or you never will. You may be missing the entire journey if you only think ahead to arrival. Every moment of the journey has something to offer if we can but look. And hey, sometimes the offering of life is to just be. Do nothing, just be you, just waste a few minutes doing nothing. Your Best Friend will enjoy the moment with you.
TMM