Meditation in Eastertide ~ Thursday, Week 2: Still Alive? Now What...

April 11, 2024 ~ Thursday in Eastertide, Week 2

Viktor Frankl*

 

Here's a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished:

if you're alive, it isn't.  

~ Richard Bach**  

Lord of Now, Lord of Forever, I'm still alive. Now what? 

     Some days it's hard work just to be alive. Other days go by so fast I hardly realize it. And then, someone you care about is suddenly gone and life takes on a new meaning, again. And just as suddenly it hits me: his/her/their mission is finished, whether s/he was ready for it to be or we who care about them were, it just is. And even if we can’t understand or figure out what someone’s life mission was, especially someone very young, even in our deepest grief we can seek a way to live in earnest, and in honest and loving purpose, because of their importance in our lives.

     Again I’m here, as I begin once more to re-evaluate and re-discover how I can live as if You, Lord, were with me every moment [as You are]. When I do come to You, I remember that I can worry less about doing stuff and think more about just being present, conscious, aware, especially with You, and then my honest and loving purpose ~ my mission ~ will become clearer. Of course I'll keep doing but I'm seeing again that if I spend more of life working to love You with all my heart, all my soul, all my strength, and my neighbors as myself ~ per Your instructions ~ that mission thing will take care of itself. Through that I will re-center my self, focus on being conscious in thought and action, movement and stillness, then perhaps more of what I do will then, simply, reflect the who I am continually becoming. Thanks for listening, as always. amen.

 *Viktor Frankl [1905-1997] was a survivor of Holocaust Concentration camps in Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt, and Bergen-Belsen. After graduating from high school he studied medicine and between 1928 and 1930, while still a medical student, he developed a number of youth counseling centers due to a rise in teen suicide. Recruiting pyschologists and psychiatrists, by 1931 there were no more teen suicides. Later he lost his father to starvation in Theresienstadt, his mother and brother to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, and, his wife to typhus in Bergen-Belsen.  After the war he headed the Neurology Department at the General Polyclinic in Vienna and established a private practice and continued to see patients until retirement in 1970. He earned a PhD in 1948 and was awarded a professorship in Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna. He was a visiting Professor at Harvard University, Southern Methodist University, and Duquesne University and was given an award by the American Psychiatric Association in 1985. He is the author of many books the most well-known of which is Man’s Search for Meaning.

  
**Richard Bach [1937- ] is an author best known for classic 1970s bestsellers:  Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, and later, There’s No Such Place as Far Away, and more. His books carry a philosophical theme that our physical limits and mortality are merely appearance. An avid pilot and love of flying nearly cut his mission short in 2012 as his small plane landed upside down in a field and he was badly injured but recovered and continues to write.

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