Continuity

One of the motivations for this Page through my four years’ journey about standard (righteous) Christian life and context relates to the ordinariness of life.  What do we do in day-by-day experiences to prepare for serving both ourselves and the everyday culture?  Whether live-and-let-live or highly motivated persons, what should accompany the life context of Christians, those who wish to develop values for themselves in cultivating wholesome life that is respectful of values and personhood?  We reviewed points like traditions (personal/social), continuity (faithfulness/meaning), habits (constructive/guided), devotion (prayer/worship – meditation for humanists).  We discuss here the integration of our lives. 

All persons ought to give themselves the gift of an honest analysis of self, perhaps going over their project with an insightful person whose life is known to be well integrated and sympathetic to listening to others.  We carry ourselves through life questions in our own personal observations related to our formation. Who am I?  It is a serious question, and is answered rather straightforwardly in terms we can understand.  The how, the where, the when, and the by-what-means will follow.  These were the questions even the ancient Romans asked when at their best, and we continue to ask.  Persons ought to know their present self, circumstances to line up matters for what they propose to be in the course of the few years of their lives.  Not to do so is to submit to the accidents of our days, to permit outside influences to dictate the course of our lives.  That wouldn’t be so bad if those influences fell to our favor, but they do not – or if they do, as accident sometimes serves us, they are much too chancy to offer comfort and success.  Very few such ships make it to port.  We do it ourselves.  We are not alone, but we begin alone at some point after separation from our parents, who told us who we are – sometimes wrongly, sometimes taking from us any desire to know or find answers.  In our freedom, the questions of self-responsibility beg for answers, not excuses.

Awake to privilege and duty (and they do dwell together) we ought to seek the good life.  To the surprise of the materialist the good life is so much more than wealth and the independence that it offers for nature’s life. It doesn’t buy health even when it pays for medical specialists.  It doesn’t buy a good family even when it provides all the benefits of society.  The good life rests with us as the energetic managers of our lives.  It is provided in the spirit that attended Jesus growing up in Nazareth.  We have every factor we need to know about in one of my favorite verses of the Bible – Luke 2:52.  In it are the main points for parents in the rearing of their children – knowledge, health, relationship and devotion.  Ultimately those factors move to the responsibility of the individual who, in living them, gains the good life.  As for any outline of bones, there must be life in the flesh attached to the ideals.  The form is easily stated in broad strokes, the answers are in the details.  The small print of our lives is vital to the larger contexts we may yearn for – or ought to yearn for.  Without the, I love you, to my wife and children, my provision of a fine home is lost to them.  In a recent TV interview, the daughter of Edgar Bergen, (the eminent ventriloquist entertainer of the mid-twentieth century, using the dummy, Charlie McCarthy as foil) – reported that she never heard from him that he loved her.  She was not remembered in his will.  There is common feeling that Bergen did love Charlie.  Although Bergen was the way she became known on her own, and turned into a talented actress, her memory of him was not touched by his wealth and influence in her behalf, but that he never gave her the most beautiful father relationship in: I love you.  (Henry Fonda’s son reported the same father context.) It is good to understand life in the contrast of steel (hard, firm, neutral) and flesh (soft, flexible, living). Some persons see themselves effective in achieving success with the hard, firm and neutral factors found in nature.  We ought to be interested in the gentle, righteous – using life factors becoming to human beings, beginning with self, and extending to other human beings.  This is God’s interest for my benefit, and God begins for me with me.  From that context, Christian life becomes good, expansive, and unique in the image of God, ending in the hope (immortality) of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  It becomes a life to overcome boredom, selfishness, egotism, arrogance, sin – and other distortions of human life.