In the middle of a pandemic, where I cannot see my students, cannot go to my church, and rarely leave home, I have been finding myself on autopilot. You know, like those things in airplanes where the plane flies itself. I was unaware that those are now so good, they can land the plane with little help from the pilots. That is a level of trust that is supreme.
In these days of restriction to home, it is easy to get on autopilot, to just go through each day, since they are all the same, without thinking much about what we do. We get up, take medicine, make coffee, check messages, read, and then……well that is the issue really, there may or may not be an “and then”. For me, this is a time to know grace, that thing that the Divine gives us moment by moment. Autopilot living makes it hard to remember what and why you do things, you just do them from rote memory and without much thought.
I wonder how many of us are guilty of living “autopilot” lives. You know, we just trust the routine, do it without thinking, and just keep moving forward. Now, don’t get me wrong, routines are important, like going to work, going to church, and taking care of chores. These are healthy and necessary. What I mean is those times when we derive our meaning from that routine, from what we are doing instead of who we are as people. Do we spend time with our families just following the routine? Do we spend time with our spouse just following the routine? Do we go and worship because it is on the list to do? Is our life with the Sacred just a routine? Are we even aware of the Other in our lives?
I think this is why retirement is so hard on so many people. They have taken their self worth from the routines, the motions they are going through, the jobs they have and never stopped and said, “hey, wait, I am me. I am not a job, not a routine, not an activity”. Retirement is hard when you have taken all of your self worth from what you do and not who you are. God does not call us to do, God calls us “to be”.
I think these days of isolation and pandemic are ones we can put to good use. It is a time where being introspective is important and when we just might find that we matter because we are God’s good creations and that is the only reason. We matter because we are loved by the Creator of the Universe. That unconditional love, that is God’s inescapable Grace.
TMM