"You ain't ever gonna burn my heart out"

On Fridays, I often reflect on time, mainly its passing. At the dawn of Western Philosophy, it was the Greek Herclitus, who, commenting on time as a function of change, observed: "No man ever steps in the same river twice." In his project of the recovery of Being (Sein), Heidegger appealed to the Pre-Socratics, of whom Heraclitus was one.

Today is Friday the Thirteenth, no less! Two days ago, I turned 61. It seems impossible to me. But here I am.

For the first ten years of my life, I lived in a very small town. It's my Mom's hometown. Back then, it was a fairly rural and farming community. We lived "in town," such as it was, not on a farm or an acerage. My Mom grew up on a farm, however. My grandparents still lived there and I spent a lot of time on their farm. Now, of course, the town is developed suburb.

Meadow Lark

I mention this because a few months ago, I started thinking about my very young self, myself as a child. I had a good, stable home with loving parents. But a main feature I remember from my early years is being alone a lot, on my own a lot.

While there were definitely times when I was lonely, that wasn't the case for the most part. I read a lot and I spent a lot of time outside. I developed a great imagination. That was a time of just laying on my back and watching and looking up at the sky, walking around and being amazed and fascinated by so many things. Listening to birds. In those days where I lived, there were a lot of meadow larks, not so many around these parts now.

Early on, around the age of 9, I had a profound experience not just of the mystery of being- though that- but the mystery of my own being. This is one reason why, as a Philosophy student later in life, I was drawn to the ontological issue of personal identity. This taught me not to be content with tidy, totalizing, or smug answers.

The problem with so many religious, specifically Christian, treatments of identity is that tend to be quite, well, smug, tidy, closed. Hence, they often lack credibility. This summer, I was introduced to a very short by the late German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz. It was Mtez who averred, "The sickness unto death of religion is not naiveté, but banality."

For those familiar with the Emergent Church movement, it was Metz who wrote the still timely book The Emergent Church. It was from this book, in which Metz takes on the all too notable reality that, at least in Western countries, Christianity has become mainly bourgeois.

But the book by Metz that was helpful, provocative, and healing for me earlier this year is the revised edition of his short work simply entitled Poverty of Spirit.

There are some other things that emerged from my deep dive into my early childhood. One evening reflecting on this, tears filled my eyes. I was flooded with tenderness for that young boy, who is me. I wanted to just hug him and ressure him about all the things about which he was anxious and fearful.

Anyway, 61 on Firday the Thirteenth. Wow. Incredible. Quite unexpectedly, I spent the afternoon of my birthday with my Mom. The last thing I said to her on my birthday, as she waved and wished me "Happy Birthday," was "Thank you for giving me birth!"

Life is a gift. But if I'm honest, I don't always see it as such. Life is a struggle, an agon, too. No tidy wrap up today.

For our traditio for Friday, November Thirteenth is Oasis with Don't Look Back In Anger, which I find to be a delightfully Beatles-esque song: