Lessons in Service

I was looking at a picture of my dad yesterday, 23rd March. I took it just a few months before he died. It’s been about 4 months now and my thoughts frequently drift, not so much to his death or absence, but simply to him. I find myself thinking about him and not in a nostalgic sense but as if he had a presence with me here now. It’s like I’m weighing something up, balancing the events of our lives. There was a long period through childhood where I was never at ease with him, like we didn’t get on. He did some dumb stuff, perhaps not as dumb as the stuff I did later in my life but I know there were moments between us that didn’t work. But when I look at myself, in many respects my dad was a stronger man. Oddly, to the self-picture I have of myself, I think he was a more disciplined man than I, more capable of fulfilling his duties and obligations. He suffered to live and he bore his suffering impeccably, without complaint or any outward show of resentment. He knew death was close yet he was comfortable with the certain fact of his own necessary demise. Seeing him so accepting of his own death taught me a lot. Obviously it said a lot about my dad, but for me I’d not seen that before. He had time to look at death, he had a measure of it and he waited with patience knowing he could do nothing. He was a man, his body made of flesh and bone, vulnerable and weak, and still he was above it all. I never at any earlier point in my life saw my dad as being in any sense a spiritual person. That was always my perception - from my mid teens pretty much up to his death. He was a social animal, an extrovert that liked people and not one to lock himself away with books and prayer. He never revealed any interest in anything spiritual, so far as I could tell, so I think I was always right in that view - he was not a man who ‘worked’ on himself. And yet, there was something in him that had most definitely developed through his long years of daily suffering. I had not seen that at all and only in his last year did I begin to intuit that he did infact possess a level of being which I had not ascribed to him, and watching him die convinced me of this. When I met the vicar with my mother and brother to discuss the funeral arrangements, I was surprised to hear my mum explain that although she was not religious, my dad had spoke of attending church services but being too unwell this had never happened. So I can say two things with certainty:

1. Though a man make no conscious effort to awaken and increase level of being, life events can actually develop something in a man’s being that will prepare him for true conscious awakening. This is something that can only play out through recurrence. It is not necessarily a sad thing to see a man suffer, if what crystalises in him through that suffering goes into essence to form a new man.

2. People are remarkable in simple ways. Despite our collective ugliness and the visible marks of a fallen race, something beautiful rises through the ordinariness of daily life, something quite unvalued, lessons in service.

[I wrote this a while ago. Maybe I would've forgotten it but I still feel this strong presence, if not more now than before. It's unusual to me. I'm just noting some feelings I guess.]