Birthday Reflections: The Best Is Yet To Be

"Grow Old Along with Me, the Best Is Yet to Be"

                                                        Robert Browning

Tomorrow is my birthday and the first Sunday in Advent which is the liturgical church's new year.  If you are like me, birthdays are mile markers that make you reflect on where you have been and where you want to go.  Birthday reflections are a joyous and pleasant custom during good times; during bad times birthday reflections might resemble emotional housecleaning for those who wish to survive to see another birthday come around. 

It is a marvelous day today.  The sky is clear, the temperature moderate and the sun brilliant.  While listening to NPR and blowing leaves off the roof  I  reflected on the previous year of my life, clearly the worst year of my life, and despite it all and an irreverent sense of humor, I came to some joyous conclusions concerning what I hope for the coming year. 

What I hope for is nothing short of truth, beauty and love. 

Truth:  My mother taught me that I should say nothing if I could not say something nice and to worry about what others think.  This principle has its appropriate time and place, but, more importantly, my father taught me that saying nothing in the face of cruelty and hypocrisy is tacit approval of same.  They both taught me that truth is an objective standard that exceeds whatever I want or what makes me feel good.  AA teaches that those who are incapable of being honest with themselves cannot and will not acquire sobriety with or without drinking, and those who do acquire sobriety can maintain that blessed state only through rigorous (scrupulously accurate) honesty in their dealings. 

Beauty:  My mother taught me to be practical and clean.  My father taught me to marvel in the joy of the senses.  It took me a lifetime of defending sensual beauty to finally be able to vocalize a response to self-righteous moral pricks who don't get it.  Beauty is not materialism; it is but a reflection of God's twinkling, swelling, radiating glory - an hors d'oeuvre of our heaven home, a ray of pure brilliance breaking free of the eternal energy to touch the earthly dimension and show us, in mosaic form, bits and pieces of the final image.  Beauty is an accumulation of small pieces of Truth that makes us feel good.  Beauty is found in more than sight.  It can be perceived by any of our senses and found in any of our values or principles.    

Love:  Love is as indefinable a word and concept as obscenity and it is commonly a word used in vain .  In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio struggled to define "hard-core" pornography, or what is obscene, and in so doing came up with one of the Supreme Court's most famous standards: I Know It When I See.  Love is like this.  Hideous cruelty occurs under the guise of love; control is coerced; freedom is denied; people are used and destroyed like disposable objects - even the very object of  love is destroyed by actions we have the nerve to call love.  Even Love's sisters, Truth and Beauty, are betrayed and denied.  Religious bullies routinely talk about loving their neighbors as themselves while they wait in the bushes to ambush.  So it seems that in reality love has routinely become "what I want right now, damn it".  But real love...well, I know it when I see it.          

In the coming year I hope to view the interactions of this life I am given through the lens of what matters and try to speak and hear the truth, seek and find beauty, give and accept love while exposing myself to positive energy sources.  I hope to ask and receive, knock and have the door open so I can go inside and find the best that is yet to be.