Hasting to Heaven

A recurring theme at church, in my reading and listening, and in my thoughts these days is the importance of maturation, making spiritual progress, moving from milk to solid food, and being purposeful about it.

I’ve just been revisiting an old friend, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. As she thinks about her craft and her identity as a writer, we quickly realize that the process of writing is actually the process of living and what she has to say applies to any of us.

Welty concentrates on two of our senses and first considers listening and then seeing. This exposure to others and the world around us starts from day one, of course. Reflection, though, is what’s needed in order for us to make sense of it all or to understand how our experiences have shaped us. Gaining this critical distance comes through growing up, much thought, and an increased perspective.

Welty’s contemplations are profound and revelatory — worth reading slowly (and then reading again):

“The transience of living, and your awareness of it, wakes up love as it teaches you mystery. We come to terms as well as we can with our lifelong exposure to the world, and we use whatever devices we may need to survive. […] If exposure is essential, still more so is reflection. Insight doesn't happen often on the click of a moment like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly, and from nowhere but within.”

Awareness or reflection, then, brings this insight that’s so necessary to make sense of life. Moreover, it “wakes up love” and teaches us “mystery.” Gaining this sense of mystery, to me, is about giving others grace and leaving them some room as we try to loom less large in ourselves.

Welty’s parents lost their first child and this loss affected them deeply, of course. Both parents tended to be over-protective and overly cautious as she and her other brothers came along. Listen to the way she reflects on her childhood, though:

“Even as we grew up, my mother could not help imposing herself between her children and whatever it was they might take it in mind to reach out for in the world. For she would get it for them, if it was good enough for them--she would have to be very sure--and give it to them, at whatever cost to herself: valiance was in her very fiber. She stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look dangerous, and so it had been to her. A way had to be found around her love sometimes, without challenging that, and at the same time cherishing it in its unassailable strength. Each of us children did, sooner or later, in part at least, solve this in a different, respectful, complicated way.”

I never in all my life.

Talk about depth of maturity! There’s a full recognition of the complicated nature of this love, but at the same time, there’s also a full appreciation of it.

So many times we stop at just dwelling on the exposures and concentrate on what life has dealt us, but I want my rule of life to always include the next step, which is awareness and reflection and then moving on in mystery.