A Morning Thought.

September is here, with gathering clouds and windy rain.
A time for gazebos to be brought in from the garden, lest the winds remove them and drape them frame and all, across the church roof. Or at the least break their frames and dump their canopies in undistinguished heaps on the floor. This year has caught me out, and the canopy which all Summer has stood protecting a small boat in the garden (awaiting the time when I might be able to set about repainting it) has already blown down. Well-a-day....

A Morning Thought preoccupies me. Having written an occasional one for a while now, I begin to think that writing a Blog is reality just an electronic form of whistling in the dark. You have no idea if there is anyone else around to hear it (read it) but as you proceed gingerly through the fearful strangeness of life, it does at least somehow comfort you yourself. I am here, and I will do what must be done, no matter what dread thing may be lurking around the corner of time, where I cannot see. I do not go about saying such things all the time, of course; indeed, mostly I don't even want to think it or admit it. But part of reality is that I am terrified of life, and what it may bring.

The merciful unknowing of youth protects us, if incompletely, from perceiving this. But as advancing years inexorably accumulate experience, it become difficult for even the most Polyanna-ish of us to ignore. I do not think I want it to be so, but sometimes life - not just the thing that may be lurking around the corner of time, but existence, Life itself - terrifies me. Becoming aware of this is strangely comforting. I live in a community of faith, whose members for the most part want to avow that one must greet each new day with hope, as they say in the popular aphorisms of fridge-magnet faith: "The present is a gift, that's why we call it the Present"....

I found myself rejecting those ways of thinking and speaking, long ago, as somehow shallow despite being kindly meant. Now I am sure I was unconsciously right; any serious religious understanding of life, the universe, and everything else.....
.....has to have room for terror and the dark morning of the soul.