A Sacred and Ordinary Life

I wonder if he knew how much meaning his life had.  I wish I had told him. 

My father died last year.  Some might say he was a simple man.  But judging someone is not the same as knowing someone.  Unless, by “simple,” they meant that he worked long days in the sun to provide for his family, tended his grapevines in the evening, and more than once built with his own hands the houses we lived in.  If by “simple” they mean that he accumulated no riches, earned no higher degrees, and never owned much more than what we needed, then call him simple.

His was a life devoted to his family and his actions, big and small, told us so.  None of this made him famous or important in the way our culture so often defines importance.  And yet, what could be more meaningful than a life spent doing the quiet and necessary work of loving?  What he could not say aloud, he said through the quiet work of his hands.

Perhaps part of the problem is that we have learned to recognize status, success, wealth, education, recognition, more easily than the ordinary moments of meaning from which a life is made.  

But belonging to something larger than ourselves does not require us to become something larger than ourselves. Perhaps meaning is found in holding the tapestry and weaving our own unique thread into it, not in rising above it.

A river does not ask whether its flow has made an impact. A tree does not worry about finding its purpose.

Perhaps the question is not, “How can I make my life matter?” but “What is my life asking of me now, in this place, among these particular people and beings?”