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Dear Faithful Readers: The free space at Tripod was filled up with my September, 2012 journal page. Welcome
to this new website which I hope will make for easier reading. Many thanks for your faithfulness in "reading me" each month
and your many encouragements to continue this journey with my hobby of sharing my life and thoughts along my "passage"....acg
This website continues my monthly journals "Letters from Arbreux","Measuring My Days", "Labri Journals", and
"Savoring My Passage". Links to these journals are here: https://acgray.tripod.com/. You can also simply google search for each of these titles.
Bridgewater,
October, 2012
Farther Along My Passage...acgray
Autumn
has arrived full blown and the year begins its rapid descent into history. Perhaps a sage will someday write
of these moments of uncertainty, of a world on the brink of drama and life changing events, not unlike other times through
which the old have lived. This October we might, if we wish, catch the magic and mystique of our world grown older and wealthier
in the treasure of falling leaves beneath our feet, mellow with sumptuous hues like silk carpets from old Samarkand. Looking back at the
summers of our life, successes have had their meaning; failures, too, but those have deeper meaning. What gives
them all meaning is that they work together toward the fulfillment of God’s plan, writes Paul Tournier, in
his book, The Seasons of Life. A consolation prize for old age is to discover, perhaps anew, the real
meaning of life. “To cling to the past, to seek most doggedly to
prolong one’s time of action means precisely this: living
a useless old age”, writes Tournier. “It is the pressing need to find meaning for one’s life, to subordinate the whole of life to that meaning. It
is this need, this inner aspiration, which is from God. All the ideologies, doctrines, and formulas drawn up
by men will pass; every ideal too, grows old in turn. Only the true and living God remains. Thus the knowing encounter with the living God is the greatest possible human event: the
human experience par excellence....It is this knowing which remains as the common denominator of all life’s stages.”
Last month I spent three days at the Outer Banks in North Carolina. While there I read again Henry Beston's
lyrical and classic book, The Outermost House, from which the following excerpt was edited.
Last month I spent three days at the Outer Banks in North Carolina. While there I read again Henry Beston's
lyrical and classic book, The Outermost House, from which the following excerpt was edited.
“No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the flights of these
shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms in an instant of time, and in that same instant develops its own will.
Birds which have been feeding yards away from each other, each one individually busy for his body’s sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one,
tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined….My special interest is the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body
to the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does this will to suffuse the living constellation that
its dozen or more tiny brains know and obey it in such an instance of time? Schools of fish, I am told, make similar mass
changes of direction….We
need another wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated
artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified
and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incomplete-ness, for their tragic fate of having taken form
so far below ourselves. And therein we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete
than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by
voices we shall never hear. They are not our brethren, they are not our underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves
in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. “ Henry Beston, The Outermost House
Thank you for sharing this website with others....acg
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