59 The End of Days
The rains started on Good Friday again this year, bringing to a close the dry season which had been rather humid even up here in the hills. I’m told it’s not the start of the monsoon proper, but the rains fall nearly every day, and it certainly brings any fears of a drought to an end. I moved to the city at Easter, and I’m now living in a large disused classroom in the same complex I stayed at last year. It’s a delightful room, open and airy, the solid walls only rising a couple of feet before giving way to grill-work. The room is hidden away a little behind some other buildings so althou59-the-end-of-daysgh it is open I still retain my privacy. The rains fall in the mid afternoon, when it tends to be heavier, or sometimes they arrive as a lighter shower in the early evening. In either case they are heralded by thunder which rolls about the hills and valleys. The roof of my room is of corrugated iron sheeting, and when the rain is heavy the drumming on the roof can be quite deafening. In the centre of the compound is a dishevelled garden with Jak, Mango, Avocado, and other fruit trees. The view from my easy chair overlooks this garden, and as soon as the worst of the rain is over mynahs, babblers, and other birds come to ground to see what has been washed up for supper. After the rains I usually take time for walking meditation and it’s a very beautiful time, with a coolness in the air, and the trees still dripping, every leaf having been washed clean. As the sun sets a robin sings the last sweet song of the day, and the whole world seems, by the grace of God, to have been refreshed.
My last day with the children: on my hip sits Rajan happy to be dandled around the ward in this way. On my left is Deepa, leaning against me, her hand in mine. When she first came here she was such a withdrawn child, very difficult to make contact with. Now a year on she is bright-eyed, outgoing, and helps around the place in any way she can. On a little blue train sits Parimala, shouting for her ‘uncle’ to come and push her around – actually a wheel on the train is broken and it no longer goes, as in the past, at superfast speed around the ward drawing out cries of delight from this excitable child, and she has to content herself with going side to side. In the short time she’s been here Parimala has also learned to wait her turn and not to attack the other children as in the past. In front of me Kumari is pointing as usual. What she points at is so irrelevant it’s sometimes non-existent! She just wants someone to do things for her and it doesn’t really matter what it is. Sitting on the mat Isra is still smiling.
Some of the children will miss their playmate tomorrow, others may not even notice, but there is a great sadness in my heart as once more I prepare to depart. It seems to me that over the past few years I have known an uncommon amount and variety of deaths, little ones and big ones. A friend once said that the Lord was trying to teach me something by this constant call to commitment and departure. Only a love that can leave its object without regret is a true love. Only if there can be a letting go can there be communion, everything else is love distorted into self-gratification and self-enlargement. Love doesn’t deny the pain of separation, but nor does it indulge it either. Love is an open heart that is not resisting the change and flow of life. Love is built on trust and faith, not in oneself, but in life itself and he who sustains it. In order for there to be compassion there must be passion, not the transcendence of the human condition, but a full opening to life without fear, and then one may find that one has died to self, for the self is the movement of fear and resistance, which is the past.
To die to self today doesn’t mean we will not have to die to self tomorrow: how much we would like to make a big show and get it over with, and how little we are prepared to die in a small way day by day. Today, in the present, is the only place that the life of God can be born into the world, and tomorrow it will be a different time, a different place, but the same opportunity, if one is not trying to rebirth yesterday, fearing the ’morrow, which serves but to obscure the present. For the heart to offer no resistance is freedom from self-contradiction, no longer thinking: here I can, there I can’t, but knowing that the life of God can be born into any situation where resistance to life has come to an end, be it in poverty or riches, sorrow or joy.
I only discovered here now
am I too late to enjoy it?
the birds flying to and fro
from bamboo to Bo tree again
the wind blows through the trees
the robin sings from the branch
I join him in his play
we are now in communion