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The Days of Our Lives

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

I was reading through the Book of Genesis, as one does, when a repeated phrase in chapter 5 made me pause. The phrase was “all the days of” as in “Thus all the days of Seth were nine hundred twelve years.”  As I noted, the phrase gets repeated: “all the days of Enosh;”  “all the days of Kenan,”  and so on.  Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech—each of them was given lots and lots of days, according to Genesis 5,  but after telling us how many years of days they lived, each account ends with a stark “and he died.”  Well, except for Enoch, but he was a special case.  

Apparently God thought this kind of longevity was excessive.  Right out of the chute in chapter 6 we read, “Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”  It looks like that was meant to be an upper limit and not a prescription for everybody because almost nobody actually gets that old.  The longest verified human lifespan in recent times is that of Jeanne Louise Calment of France (1875–1997).  Genesis would say the days of Jeanne Louise were one hundred twenty-two years and 164 days; and she died.  So she got a couple of bonus years on top of the 120.  Good for her. 

In Psalm 90 that upper limit gets a few more years lopped off.  “The days of our life are seventy years, perhaps 80 if we are strong,” we read in verse 10.   Tradition says that Psalm 90 was written by Moses.  If so, then Moses was in a pretty dark mood that day. It’s not a happy Psalm, Psalm 90, and the curtailed life span is the least of its gloominess.  Oy.

The point of all this is that our days on this earth are numbered.  Frankly, I’m okay with that, even though I’m indisputably closer to the end than to the beginning.  C’est la vie, as Jeanne Louise would say if she were still here.  I’m okay with going on to what comes next, especially since I’m pretty sure that time will be experienced in a very different way—if we experience it at all. It’s all in God’s hands, so it’s all good.

Here’s what’s not good and what I’m not okay with: if we don’t clean up our act, then life on earth, at least life as we know it, is in real trouble.  If we don’t make some major changes starting yesterday, then our days as a species are numbered…and we’ll take a lot of other species with us.  Scientists are already calling our age the Anthropocene. They give names like that to bygone eras of mass extinction.  Anthropocene.  From anthropos, the Greek word for human.  When they call this current era the Anthropocene, they are saying that this is the era in which humanity has caused the extinction of massive numbers of other species.  Not our proudest moment.

I don’t care so much about my own personal extinction.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil, but I’m also not worried about it.  It will come when it comes.  On the other hand, I care quite a lot about the threat of extinction to the various biomes of this beautiful planet, and all the other creatures that share the earth with us.  I quite like dogs,  for instance.  And cats and horses and frogs and dolphins and owls and even crows.  And octopuses, who, it turns out, are quite smart!  They didn’t have a say in the damage we’ve created with our massive carbon footprints.  They weren’t given a vote when our plastics were swept into the waters of the world.  I rather suspect they would have objected.  Strenuously.  I also care quite a lot about my children and grandsons and their potential progeny.  I would like for them to live in a world at least as nice as the one I’ve lived in.

Helen Caldicott once wrote, “We didn’t inherit the earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.”   She has a really good point.  We did inherit some things from our parents, especially attitudes and habits that can have a profound effect on what the world will be like when we hand it over to those who come after us.  It would do us all a world of good if we treated the world as if we were renting it from the future and wanted to return it in better shape than when we entered it so we can get our security deposit back.

We are Easter people.  We believe that God can and will give all of creation a new birth, a resurrection life.  But let’s leave the timing of that up to God, shall we?  Killing the planet simply because we believe that God can un-kill it would not reflect well on us.  It’s not a good look and it will upset our grandkids.

There is a lot of amazing work being done to develop new energy and transportation sources as quickly as possible (see https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/matter_energy/batteries/.)  The world of science and technology has finally realized that we’re on a pretty serious deadline here and that there’s more at stake than impressing their colleagues.  There is really is hope for the future.  It’s slim, but it’s there.  We can help is if we all figure out how we can conserve and contribute less to the problem.  You’re all using LED lightbulbs, right?  

Your days and my days are numbered, but let’s do what we can to make sure that the world God loves (John 3:16) has a much longer and healthier run.

The Speed of Life

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

The path is so familiar, so routine, so customary that her very shoes seem to know the way, which is a good thing since her mind seems to be off on a walk of its own.  Her steps are middling slow, but her thoughts, in her careful, sorting way, are occupied with speed.  Speed of light.  Speed of life.

Sixty-six thousand six hundred fifty-nine.  She thinks it in words but sees it in her mind’s eye as a number: 66,659.  Ever since she heard that number on the radio this morning it has loomed before her, driving out every other thought.  The speaker on the radio—an astronomer? an astrophysicist?—he threw out the number so casually as if it was something everyone already knew.  “Well,” he said, “we’re all moving around the sun at 66,659 miles per hour, so one way or another we’re making progress.”  And they had laughed, the astronomer and the radio host.  And what was that other number?  One thousand forty.  “Don’t forget,” said the astronomer, “that the earth is also rotating on its axis at 1,040 miles an hour at the equator, so nobody really gets to stand still.”

She stands still, or as still as she can given that she is moving around the sun at such a horrendous speed.  Her unfocused eyes do not see the sharp dazzles of sunlight glinting on the bay or the sleek ketch making its way toward the open sea or the pelican diving for an anchovy, or the other walkers on the path or their happy, eager dogs reading the scents that dodge about in the breeze.  She is a million miles away watching her lovely blue-green planet spinning like a dervish, singing itself through space in an endless elliptical tarantella with the sun as she, herself, chases it through space, racing to catch up as it speeds away from her.

The sun wraps her in light, warm and welcoming this close to the solstice, penetrating her long sleeves and wide-brimmed hat, teasing out memories.  You used to let me touch you the sun seems to say.  You used to lie on the beach and bathe in my light.  But that was before the ozone layer had thinned.  That was before skin cancer.  That was before.  That’s the problem with moving through space at 66,659 miles an hour she thinks.  In no time at all it’s all gone by.  In no time at all your ride is over.  She lifts her eyes to the horizon but the sights of the bay on this beautiful, nearly summer day are invisible to her.

She sees a face, that dearly beloved face she misses most, and her breath catches in her throat.  She sees that face she loves in all the ages she had known and loved it.  She sees it young and radiant, framed by chestnut hair, thick and full. She sees it older, rounder, accented by the soft lines of character and hair the color of steel.  She sees it old, thin, worn and weathered, the hair a cirrus cloud of wispy snow.  She sees the old dog they both loved so much, just for a moment out on the path ahead of her, looking back, smiling, then turning to amble on ahead.  She sees old friends, family, companions standing off in the distance, all of them swallowed by the light.

Surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.  World without end. Amen.  The words come echoing up from the sanctuary of her memories, attached to half-forgotten melodies, rising from the pages of long-disused hymnals.  Oh, Jesus, must it all go by so fast?  Does it ever stop? she wonders.  And suddenly, despite the fact that the whole earth on which she stands is hurtling through space at 66,659 miles an hour, she truly is perfectly still.  No…she realizes, that’s not quite right.  I am not still, she thinks, I have stepped into stillness.  Stillness was waiting for me.  Stillness was waiting for me to stop running through life at 66,659 miles an hour.

And for the first time in this long day that has moved by so fast, she sees what’s in front of her and around her and above her and under her feet.  She sees the path, the friendly dogs, the smiling, chatting walkers, the boats, the birds, the trees, the grass, the sky of this real and present world.  She feels the sunlight on her face.  She feels the caress of the breeze and the gentle kiss of salt in the air.  She sees it, feels it, smells it, tastes it all in a clearer light, everything sharp and distinct, suffused with the Presence of the moment.  And she realizes that this moment is eternal.  That all moments are eternal.  That life is eternal.  She sees that everything and everyone she has ever loved has, indeed, gone on ahead and is, simultaneously, thanks to some divine relativity or theological quantum twist right there beside her.  She takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh of both intense longing and profound peace, and calls out to the old dog that only she can see, “Hang on, buddy.  I’ll catch up.”