What Are You Doing Here?

Summer, and heat, has come upon us unexpectedly, even though it is mid June. Those of us who rely on a good crop of runner beans for the freezer were just getting used to the idea that we were likely not to have a summer at all, and hence no beans, when along it came. I still don’t think the beans stand much of a chance. The gales and the wet have enfeebled them, possibly beyond hope.

Beyond hope. How easy and how disconcerting it is to slip into melancholy and pessimism on a day like this. Perhaps we should be better prepared. Perhaps we should know ourselves well enough to see such thought trends coming and not allow them to spoil the present moment. But the present moment is far more complex than it might seem in the heat of summer. It is, after all, shaped out of a million other moments which, according to how they are remembered, define our lives and the realities we live by.

While musing on reality, I find myself remembering another hot summer day back in February, when we were in Australia (see my post of 9^th February, 2017). We were listening to someone’s jumbled, confused, and tragic memories, the realities which shaped her life in that moment, and the pain they brought, a pain which was only partly anesthetised by drink. Such present moments, our own and other people’s, and the realities they face us with, are sometimes too hard to bear, especially when they come upon us suddenly. I remember feeling that I had not served that person well, even by listening. As far as I could see, I had been unable to effect any kind of healing.

Our own realities need a time of gentle germination before they are exposed to the terrifying light of memory. Heat, like today’s heat, forces the seeds of  long buried memory to germinate, to seek the light and warmth needed for growth and healing. The light is also in the telling of them, whether spoken or written, and the warmth is in the listening, or in the kind of attentive reading which enables us to understand and accept, through the story being told, how our most private memories shape the realities we live by.

On such a day as this, in the sudden heat of mid June, these memories are revealed to us, perhaps for the first time, like a piece of pottery straight out of the kiln. They emerge, hot, in this present moment of heat and soporific silence. Silence is not the absence of sound, or even of noise. It is the ‘still small voice’ heard at the very heart of that noise and of today’s heat – out of the fire  in which Elijah heard it, as he dared to face down God’s question “What are you doing here?” Heat forces itself on us with this question, a question which waits on our memories for an answer.

“What are you doing here?” is all that is left after all other questions have been burned away, or ‘refined’ as the bible puts it. What shall I do? How can I love or make myself deserving of love? Why am I unhappy? These questions matter to the extent that they enable us to know the answer to that one seminal question. “What are you doing here?” What is the meaning and purpose of your life in relation to God – or in the fear and resistance to such a relation? Part of the refining process involves how we process our memories. These memories, and how we live with them, pertain to the reality, or non-reality, of our existence, to whether the life we lead is really worth living. Right remembering always pertains to the truth, even though that truth may need to be fictionalised, painted or rendered into music or, perhaps, mathematics. These all serve the refining process, our own and that of others.

This is why art and scientific research matter so much. Science which is pursued with the artist’s reverence for truth and life is salvific. As separate life paths, art and science yield knowledge about the kind of truth which saves us from ourselves and from the delusions which are the product of wilful ignorance. Such knowledge also pertains to justice, our own just dealings, including our thoughts and mindsets in regard to any number of historical events and current social issues, and returns us to the desire for a deep and unnameable truth. Taken together, the desire for justice and for knowledge of deep truth comprise a ‘push’ for life, or  a resistance to it. They therefore pertain to every single person’s life choices.

Being ‘refined’ begins with allowing ourselves to be questioned by God, as Elijah was and as the allegorical figures of Adam and Eve were before him. In both cases, the question remains the same, “What are you doing here?” We babble excuses and justifications for ourselves and for the life we presently live, as Elijah did. Or we blame someone else, as Adam did. We also blame circumstances, often justifiably. But silence always returns us to the same question, “What are you doing here?” because the one who asks it is the answer.