Category: Reflections
Life is an Adventure: A Narrative View of Pivotal Decisions
[A mosque, a synagogue, and a church relocate from their individual locations and rebuild on a shared property in Omaha. In doing so, they create the Tri-Faith Initiative, a 38-acre location where the three houses of faith are joined together by the Abrahamic Bridge, a circular pathway linking the faith partners. The following was presented to the three houses of faith that constitute the Tri-Faith partnership.]
All things have context. Today, we recognize the larger framework of our relationships that constitute the Tri-Faith houses of faith. Tri-Faith members are bound together by a particular shared story each uses as a reference point for faith. This is the shared memory of a family in southern Iraq nearly 4,000 years ago where they lived a settled life.
Today, we draw on that shared, sacred memory, recognizing one another in the Tri-Faith partnership as something of spiritual cousins. Like every family memory there are wonderful memories and also memories we might choose to forget … both are signs this story is a family memory. So, we explore the story of Abram and Sarai as a means of exploring the experience of making pivotal decisions that has the power to launch our lives in new directions.
In leaving adolescence and the family nest from which we emerge on our way to adulthood, who has a clear idea of which direction you will take in life? It appears we make decisions that create the future, not that we choose a sharply-defined future and then carve the path toward that desired end.
Looking back, it seems I have made hundreds, maybe thousands, of decisions (small & large) that delivered me to this present moment. It’s as if I was doing my best to make good decisions in a farmer’s corn maze & I held blind trust in the goodness of life that I would eventually find my way … but to where? Most of those thousands of choices were forgettable (i.e., statistically insignificant) and yet occasionally a truly big decision was mine to make although at the time I could hardly distinguish the big decisions from the insignificant ones.
Along the way, there have been key people in my life who’ve unknowingly shined a light on the path to my eventual future. There have been opportunities that have come my way that opened one door after another toward new directions I might never have selected for myself. There have been events that unfolded that swept me up in a wave that carried me to unimaginable, unplanned shores.
To be sure, I have been a partner by acting in sync with those opportunities with my own wisdom in making decisions both good and bad, but noticeably I’ve not been in control of all things, just present and alert to the direction the winds may take me. Call it faith. Call it destiny. Call it providence. Call it whatever makes the unexplainable make sense. We are adventurers because life is an adventure. With all that, know that woven into those inherent gifts is an element of risk. We are adventurers because life itself is a risky adventure.
The Qur’an extols Abram as a model, an exemplar, obedient and not an idolater. Abraham/ʾIbrāhīm was a prophet and messenger of God. Additionally, he was an ancestor to the Ishmaelite Arabs and Israelites, and a historic figure for Christian faith. He is our shared ancestor of faith whether you are Muslim, Jewish, or Christian.
This ancient story is a universal model for faith that gets re-enacted every day, somewhere, anytime a desert nomad crosses an unmarked border from one country to another in search of a land of promise. The words of calling have currency in our minds, “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and our kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’ So, Abram went …” (Gen. 12:1, 4).
Abram & Sarai’s story is a story of heritage, about our forefathers and foremothers who lived long before our time and who journeyed in faith but whose courage to go forth nurtures us today.
Something happens that serves to turn our attention away from the first half accomplishments toward something deeper, something that alters our life’s trajectory. At some key point, the supposed achievements of individuation or identity falls apart and show themselves to be lacking. We come to a blockade and our progress slows or halts.
It must be noted our holy writings don’t shine much of a light on the inner world of Abram. Per usual, Sarai shares more of her thinking than her silent husband. In our 21st century awareness, we’re starved for indicators of whether he was happy with his life or whether he was unconsciously unsettled and open for a big shift. Abram claims he had a vision from God to sell it all, pack it up, and follow the Voice to “who knows where?”
This story, like others in Genesis, are archetypal stories we can study for similar issues we all face in life. These “first stories” are embedded with universal human concerns that bring us all together for the similarities we all face in life. This topic of making a dramatic life choice late in life, in the quest for meaning, is the subject of literature, art, novels, and poetry.
Larry McMurtry wrote a series of stories told to describe the arc of life, from adolescence to older adulthood and death. It began decades ago, at the dawn of his fame as a writer in his highly regarded, The Last Picture Show. McMurtry took the characters from that beginning and created other strong characters as one story evolved into the next, through five novels all tracing a handful of characters from adolescence across the arc of life. McMurtry gives us a cast of characters centered on the hardscrabble oilman Duane Moore.
From his adolescence forward, Duane lives a desperate, unreflective existence across the first half of his adulthood. But in contrast to his meager life, he continues to grow, as he confronts the richness of his curious inner sense of self in contrast to the arid oil patch where there are seemingly as many pickup trucks as there are people. This is a bleak landscape where the blue-collar working class are predictably bored by the limited life dramas observed from the wall of windows of the local Dairy Queen.
In Duane’s Depressed, the third of these novels, Duane turned 62 and realized he’d spent enough of his life in the oil patch riding back and forth from oil rig to oil rig and had grown bored and tired of his life, his worthless adult kids, and their equally worthless grandchildren. These colorful offspring latched onto Duane and his wife Karla for funding their vapid, dependent lives.
As he crossed over the last days of middle age and stood on the threshold of older adulthood, his wife Karla diagnosed him for his depression. After hearing that, in a moment of clarity about his life, he tossed his truck keys into a chipped ceramic coffee cup and struck out walking. He moved out of their house where he felt trapped by his life and moved out to his one-room hunting shack in the middle of nowhere.
Most of his family and friends were convinced he’d lost his sanity, but Duane had come to a late-blooming sense of just what he should do with himself and his actions were given to making the changes that helped him reorient himself to what his life should truly come to be. Duane had come to the end of one life and he took up a new direction. McMurtry paints the crisis of self this way: “What happened to him had nothing to do with a deterioration in his major relationships. Even to say something simplistic, such as that it was time for a change, would not be stating the matter accurately. It wasn’t that it was time for a change, particularly; it was that he had just changed … He didn’t become a different man, but when he stepped out of his house he found himself in a different life … He had just walked off: with no animosity toward anyone, with no intent to harm, wishing everybody well – just walked off … The change had just come, as naturally as a change in the weather – one day cloudy, one day fair.”
It’s obvious the storyteller has the power to shine a light on the challenges of this strained stage of life where one comes face-to-face with the fault lines of a life where change must be addressed.
In the fictional life of oilman Duane Moore, we have a model for reflection. The actions he takes are abrupt but purposeful. He moves away from a cumulative brokenness in his interior world and chooses to ignore the bad advice of others who love him but can’t be silent about their disapproval. Could this be an adequate model for us to understand we must change in order to survive?
In the interconnected world in a family, one can see how the web of others can powerfully resist one’s impulse to change. At the fruitful stage where personal reflection can lead us to rethink our lives, we might want to explore a new path.
A convergence occurs in this Middle Passage signified by life experience, a strong presence of both successes and failures, and a desire to make meaning out of where we now stand in relation to this middle ground between the first and second halves of our lives. Perhaps we come to clarity that we have been living someone else’s life, that their demands are being lived out directing our own values and our decisions.
Carl Jung, the cartographer of the arc of life, maps this challenge as the realization we have made the long climb to this middle stage and now we are challenged to descend the path we have taken. We have finally come to the crisis of change as the goals and tasks in the stage of life we inhabit have shifted. The goal of childhood is to become an individual and the goal of adulthood is to give that individuality away. The task of childhood is to separate while the task of adulthood is to connect. By mid-life, we seek to make meaning out of life and to live more fully our true self.
Many come to experience this crisis of change in the middle years of our lives after we re-awaken our awareness through deep reflection how the journey thus far has been lived. All the grinding to create a life lived without reflection must give way to the courage that we must go in new directions to recover ourselves in order to fulfill our calling in life. This may be experienced as an itch, or a twitch, a subtle demand, or a deep inner yearning. We must give ourself to making the needed changes or we will stagnate. How we accept the challenge of change will vary from person to person.
Some will choose symbolic actions that point to an inner shift they are following such as acquiring a tattoo of some deep meaning, accepting a challenge they’ve put off such as hiking the Appalachian Trail or the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Some will go back to school. Some will leave the work that has consumed them for the last several decades and do something altogether different such as go to law school, or open a soup kitchen or a bike shop. Some will grow their hair long or cut it all off. Take up a serious hobby. The point is not so much the thing itself but what it means.
Life is an adventure. Listen again to the wisdom of the poet who asks, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver)
Keith D. Herron
Supplemental Assistant Professor of Creative Leadership
Central Seminary
kherron@cbts.edu
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.