Bo and Steve Stern

I have mentioned this couple before in my blogs. Bo has chronicled their experience of ALS/MND in her own blog. Yesterday's was especially moving for me, because I find it so easy to transpose Jane for Bo. My form of MND is not the same as Steve's, not so rapid, but the "muscle" in our marriage is very much Jane's. Here is Bo's blog post, called A Letter to 1985 revisited - in our case the date would be 1974. Do follow the link to Steve's part of the story.

I can’t begin to describe this past week, but my husband has done a good job telling part of the story here. I’ve never known a season more emotionally demanding. After a sleepless night, turning decisions and memories over in my mind a million times, I finally came to this one conclusion: Life is harder than I ever dreamed it would be, but as beautiful as I’ll let it be. So, on this the 14th day of March, 2014, I declare to you that Life. Is. Beautiful. Here’s a post I wrote awhile back. I believe in it more now than ever: —————————————————– Dear Very, Very Young Bo, You are about to walk down the aisle and marry the love of your life. You will say vows that are made of fancy words like protect, honor and “troth” (pretend you know what it means). You will promise to love Steve. He will promise to love you. You will promise to take care of him. He will promise to take care of you. In your heart, you will feel love beyond all sense of reason and you will be ready to sacrifice anything for him. Anything. Then the laundry will pile up. And he will want to go golfing when you want to have a long talk about a subject that is only interesting to you. And that’s when you’ll start to build some bargains into your relationship and they will sound almost vow-like in their virtue. You will tell him he can go golfing on Saturday if he will also clean the garage on Friday. You’ll agree to fold his underwear if he agrees to wash your car. You’ll make deals and he’ll make deals and before you know it, you’ll be living in a world that is fair-and-square and even-steven. You’ll learn to expect all the emotional ledgers to be balanced with exactly the right ratios of give-and-take. But eventually, your fear will get the best of you and you’ll have no courage to bring into…anything. Steve will find that all the chips have been moved to his side of the table as he works triple time to assure you that you are loved and safe. It will make him weary, but don’t even worry, he’ll handle it like the champ you only suspect he is now. He’ll love you fiercely and fight for your freedom and you will never feel for a moment that he regrets choosing you. Never for a moment. His love will help you find what you need to become brave like you’ve never imagined you could be. And that newfound courage? Hold onto it with both hands. Because, sister, the future you see as you peer through your wedding veil is going to take a turn you cannot possibly see coming. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. The day will come when you will be all the muscle in this marriage and you should stop laughing now, because I’m not actually kidding (but the comedy of the situation is not lost on me.) A dark day will come when you will steady his shaking hand as you sit in a hospital waiting room. You will button his shirt and help him shave. You will do the driving and the lifting and the working…but he will still be brave enough for both of you. Not gonna lie: some moments you’ll feel like you’ll buckle beneath the weight, but you won’t and neither will he. Because it turns out the vows aren’t perfect and they aren’t even-steven, but they are strong and real. They’re as strong as you’re willing to live them and as strong as the God who heard you say them. One day you’ll see a young, healthy couple make their promises, dressed in white. You will think about how they have all their days ahead of them and your heart will do a little squeeze because you remember that very moment in your life when the future stretched out so wide. But here’s the thing: you won’t envy them. Because you’ll know what you have is proven and true. It’s made of long nights and hard fights and a lot of giving when it seemed there was nothing more to give. In a world that is more comfortable with quitting than sticking, you will discover that the truest joy is not found in the shallows, but out in the deep. So, go say your vows. Eat the cake. Love your life. You will never regret this choice. But you might regret that dress. With courage, Much Older Bo

 "Many waters cannot quench love,
    neither can floods drown it.
If a man offered for love
    all the wealth of his house,    
he would be utterly despised" (Song of Solomon 8.7)

Beautiful Battlefields

I always think it must be harder for the carer than for the sufferer in a case like mine. There is so little you can do, except be there. I have a good friend in Australia who's called Liz. She lost her husband to MND a few years back. Today she sent me Easter blessings and told me about a new book by a lady named Bo Stern, Beautiful Battlefields. Her husband was diagnosed with ALS/MND in 2011. I'd love to meet her. She's a young (well, she looks young to me!) pastor in Oregon. She has a blog called The Difference of Day, and she writes well. I hope she won't mind my quoting her Good Friday post, which is a lovely counter-balance to my rather dour one.
The Best Friday

It’s interesting to me that we call the worst day in all of history “Good Friday.”  Maybe we intuitively understand that the best thing in our lives came out of the darkest moment in His.

I think Paul got it exactly right with this bold statement:   “I want to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering…”

I don’t like suffering, but I keep running into evidence that it’s important.  Suffering sets the stage for victory, making all things possible.

Unless a seed falls and dies, it cannot bear fruit.

When our seeds of hope are buried in the soil of suffering, everything falls away from them except real, true life.   And it feels like all is lost and all is winter.

Then bursting forth in glorious day…

I love this Beautiful Friday.

Happy Easter.
Bo.

I shall be getting hold of Beautiful Battlefields.

This is the song from which she quotes: In Christ alone. Brilliant! I find it hard singing the last verse; I believe it so much. Easter has never ended!

The miracle of life

I have a great friend, Peter, who has the same slow form of ALS/MND as me. In fact we met again last week at the hospice. He wrote to me yesterday about someone who'd died recently after the quick form of the disease. He said, "We are so lucky. I saw something in the paper last week by a teenager who died of cancer. He said, 'Life is suffering but every second is a miracle'. So true." 

The vulnerable mind

Last Friday, the Evangelical Alliance published an article of mine in their Friday night theology series. The aim is to write about 500 words on something topical. I've written for them a number of times, but I think in the end I have been most pleased with this article. You can read it here: Friday Night Theology: The Vulnerable Mind.

It's very tempting for Christians to pretend life is a bed of roses for them. I think that has a number of causes. One is the habit that preachers used to have of saying something like, "Come to Jesus and all your problems will be sorted." As Anne said at Stanford's Festival Songs of Praise last Sunday, that certainly wasn't the message that Saul, later St Paul, was given at his conversion, as God tells the reluctant evangelist, Ananias, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” Not a great sales pitch! 


Another is the culture of "strength" fostered among the clergy. It's not done to admit weakness, either mistakes or mental fragility. I was very fortunate when I was an apprentice pastor to have an understanding boss - as within my first year I was plagued by panic attacks. Early intervention and counselling restored my equilibrium. Later on, I actually believe that my MND, which is such an obvious weakness, helped some in our church to feel free to admit to their vulnerabilities. It made us all more real with each other and with God. 


Depression is of course not at all obvious. It may creep up insidiously as MND does, but it's easier to conceal and has a public stigma which encourages concealment. However, to my mind, it's worse than any physical ailment, as is true for all mental unwellness. The truth is that people of faith have never been insulated from mental struggles. Look through the Old Testament and try to find heroes of faith who sailed untroubled through life.... Of course the example who is most often cited is Elijah, whose treatment begins with food and rest, but you can uncover questionings, doubts and tears all over the place. The psalms contain their fair share of complaints and honest misery. If you've suffered depression, you'll recognise the feeling of Psalm 55: 

“Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
⁷ yes, I would wander far away;
    I would lodge in the wilderness;
⁸ I would hurry to find a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest."

Jesus himself was not immune from doubts (in the temptations) or from the sense of God having abandoned him. When he said, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" I can't believe he was pretending, or merely reciting poetry. I believe he was using the closest words he could find to describe his experience. "This is what I'm going through - and it hurts even more than the nails." The sheer cliffs of the mind are dreadful places to hang.

My article was inspired, oddly enough, by the transparent honesty of four MPs in a recent debate. When, I wondered, did I last hear a prominent church leader talking about his struggle with mental health? Would someone who admitted the vulnerability even be considered for ministry in the church? And if not, what sort of message does that send to other Christians? The wrong sort. The Church is not the domain of the strong and satisfied; it's the haven for the hurting and the hungry. It's not the resort of the successful, but of the lost and limping. It has good news not for the righteous, but for washed-up sinners. It's meant to be a ragbag of mixed-up, messed-up men and women, not there in the first place because they need mending, but there because they need loving - and they are loved. And because Christ loves every member of his motley Church and gave himself for them, so they in turn are meant to accept and love each other in the same way, without conditions and without reservations.

"There is always hope"

A good friend of mine with a different sort of MND lives in the village of Longhope in Gloucestershire. I must say, although I've never been there, it looks an idyllic place. There are lots of hill walks in around the village, which now of course my friend isn't able to enjoy. What I particularly like about the village is its name. Apparently it means "long enclosed valley" - which in a way is apt as that's what chronic illness can feel like, but I prefer to think of it as "long-held hope" (expectation). Whether that's the hope of a cure being discovered by some God-inspired researchers or of green pastures where one day we'll dwell in his presence for ever, holding on to hope is a blessing worth having.

It's not the only thing that keeps us going. Another is receiving the gift of a new day every day. Our garden's not spectacular by any means, but I still gaze out of the window each breakfast time and admire the vitality and variety of creation. When it's raining the earth is dark and grateful; when it's stopped raindrops catch the light in unlooked for places; when the sun comes out, the hazel leaves take on a fresh lime-green vibrancy. And of course the greatest blessing is being loved.

I gather, from yesterday's Independent, that "Banksy's image of kissing policemen, originally daubed on a Brighton pub wall, has been surprisingly named the single work of art that best expresses British identity in a poll of 1,000 artists." I'm not sure what that says about contemporary British artists! It so happens we were talking with Pete and Jane a week ago, not about that graffito, but about "There is always hope", which I think first appeared on the South Bank. We were provoked by the question I'd read asking how we would relate it to the Christian good news (the writer saw the escaped balloon as symbolising forlorn hope and related it to the "better hope" that we have in Jesus). I myself imagined Jesus leaning down over the parapet and catching the balloon and giving it back to the girl, as many times as she let go of it, for, as the hymn puts it, "the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind". I think that's what the Incarnation (Jesus' birth) and the Atonement (his death) are about, his coming down with forgiveness and love for all and always.

The King's Blog

This week I received an email out of the blue from Melbourne, Australia. It was from a Jesuit priest, Geoff King, who was diagnosed with another rare form of MND last July. He writes beautifully clearly and without self-pity, about his experience of PMA, in particular "flail limb". The technical difference is that different sets of motor neurones are affected, but as he comments the symptoms are not so very different. He has begun a blog which I think is beautiful and helpful, The King's Blog. It's a mixture of matter-of-fact recording of experiences and reflections arising from them. Unlike me, he avoids rambling!

Yes, I'm recommending it!

He posted an entry on the 25th headed "Patient Transport" which reflected on the patience people learn from disability - whether those who are disabled or those who surround them. It ends like this:
"I close with a quotation from Tomas Halik, who visited Australia last year, a quotation that means more and more to me as the muscular atrophy progresses. 'Patience with others is love. Patience with oneself is hope. Patience with God is faith.'"

Farewell

If you have a memory for such things, you may remember that in June last year our friends, Jean and John, put on a successful coffee morning in aid of the MNDA just down the road in Grove. It was a lovely sunny morning and a thoroughly cheerful time. I commented here, "As well as friends and neighbours, there were four of us there who had MND at various points of progression, Jean herself, David the herb farmer, Maria the shopper, and me. Three of us were out in the garden, and, yes, we did talk about our frustrations and the lessons we'd learned, but it wasn't a moany sort of conversation. It was companionable, and at times jokey."

David and Jean both died before Christmas. Last Wednesday night, Maria too died. Maria too was a delightful person - a devout Catholic with a sense of fun and hope. It's sad to realise I shan't be seeing her again, this side of the grave. The deaths of these three local friends and Jozanne thousands of miles away bring home to me the speed and harsh reality of the usual MND. I was talking about this recently with my physio and saying how I feel almost guilty to be among the "lucky" few with a very slow form. She gently pointed out the irrationality of the feeling! She also commented on the amazing qualities such as strength that the illness brings out in the family carers. That was certainly true of Eric, Maria's husband, and Camilla, her daughter. One of my other conclusions is that I would now put a "health warning" at the start of My Donkeybody, saying it's an account of PLS, a very gradual form of MND and far from typical, so that readers don't have unrealistic expectations raised for themselves or their relatives. (At the moment it's in the appendix.) So it's vale, Maria - farewell, till we meet again.

[from http://mydonkeybody.blogspot.com/]

Saying goodbye

Another sad funeral yesterday of our friend Jean who lived in Grove and also had MND, though hers was rampantly quick. I hadn't expected to be able to go, but thanks to Paul taking a shift of caring duties this week and thanks to RSA Insurance being very obliging with insuring our Motability car, he drove us and pushed me there. As always at funerals we learned a lot about her, including a lovely story about the start of her romance with John in West London, involving "Fight or flight"! After marrying they moved into a new house here, where they've been ever since.

Her life was incredibly full, and in particular full of people, whom she'd cared for or helped, run clubs for or raised money for. Most of all she enjoyed her family, including 7 grandchildren. We really got to know her in the last year of her life because of her MND, and even in its frightening onset you could see her sense of fun and her enjoyment of friends and family.

I was reminded of her when I read this from the empower network.com. It's about the top five regrets people have on their deathbeds. I think it's written by a palliative care nurse named Caroline, and I thought, "I doubt Jean had many such regrets, especially about neglected relationships":

"For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality.

"I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

"When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

"1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

"It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

"2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

"By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

"3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

"We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

"4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

"It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end.
That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

"5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again. When you are on your deathbed, what  others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying."

I'd add one more, "I wish I'd stayed in touch with God." I suspect it's a big one.

Sad but not hopeless

I was out at the doctor's for a routine visit yesterday, and so John left a message. It was the saddest news. His lovely wife who had MND for a very short time has died. Their home is at the other side of Grove. She had deteriorated so rapidly. As John later commented, their overwhelming sense was gratitude that Jean hadn't suffered longer. It is a wretched disease - and a wretched time to lose someone.

This is my prayer for Jean:
Support us, O Lord,
all the day long of this troublous life,
until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes,
the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over,
and our work is done.
Then, Lord, in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging,
and a holy rest, and peace at the last;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. (attributed to John Henry Newman) I'm reminded of St Paul's, "If for this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable." But we do have hope, which lasts beyond this life.  For Jean that hope is reality.

Tea with tears

David Thomas (centre)

Yesterday a group of us with MND and our families were invited for tea at the Kingswell near Harwell. It was a good time. Four of us were in wheelchairs, and there was Lorraine's new grandson, Max, just a few days old. The one person whom we all missed was our friend, David Thomas. I refer to him in the Diary of a Donkeybody blog as "the herb gardener" because he used to joke about having left his cannabis farm for the afternoon! He died last Thursday at his home. Everyone would comment on his spark and his wit and sense of fun. He was also very brave. The disease affected him severely and rapidly. My picture shows him at a meeting in May last year.

He went to Sandhurst and served in the Royal Artillery. He was a crack shot and had been chairman of the British Pistol Club. Last year despite his illness he completed an MA in First World War Studies at Birmingham, writing a unique dissertation:

He took great pleasure in seeing the weddings of both his daughter last year and his son this year. We all felt his absence as we shared our tea. Because he was above all a lovely man and he and wife Penny an inspiring couple. A mutual friend wrote this morning: "I will never forget his wit and cheeky sparkle. MND is such a cruel disease :( " I have to say her mother, who has it too, is a pretty sparkly lady also. Which is quite something as we're all aware, to one degree or another, of the limit to the Christmases we'll live to enjoy with our families.

Perhaps that's the reason too why none of us was in a hurry to leave that friendly room, where we were able to share, either with laboured speech or via speaking device, with others who just understood and people who cared.

It was dusk as we left and the Friday traffic from Reading was already streaming past. Then it was time for supper and relaxing by the tv. I'd recorded Rev. from the night before, to which I have ambivalent feelings. This episode I thought was well done. There's a brilliant new teacher at the church school of which the Rev is chair of governors. However he's an articulate lapsed Catholic atheist. The head loves him; the vicar loathes him. On the day of the religious inspection Mr Feld is late. In fact he's been knocked off his bike and is dead. The Rev has to give the assembly. He begins, "It's very difficult to know what to say at times like this. We won't be seeing Mr Feld again here, because Matthew's gone somewhere else now. Matthew didn't believe in Heaven, but I do. I don't know what it is, but I do know a story that gives me an idea. It's a story about a lot of little bugs that lived at the bottom of a river. And every now and then one of the little bugs would crawl up a stem through the water, up into the light - and would never be seen again...."

Waterbugs and Dragonflies 

It's not an original story. In fact I used to keep a copy to explain death to bereaved children. The point of the story is that the "bug" turns into a beautiful dragonfly able to fly, but can't reassure the bugs he's left behind because he can't ever get back there. This upset him "until he remembered that all his friends one day would climb up the stems and join him in the sun."

It's clearly not a story for adults. It's a very simple version of the truth, which of course the children (and we) can take or leave. I would say that the metamorphosis is not automatic, but it's certainly God's offer and desire that we should exchange our bodies for a superior model, which won't have the weakness, disease and frustration we now experience and which won't ever wear out. I'd say the picture of nymph and dragonfly is not a bad analogy, except eternity's longer than a month! There's a verse somewhere which talks about the good things that pass our understanding which God has prepared for those who love him.

Being a clay jar

I don't know whether I have any Syrians among my ancestors; I certainly have some Isaacs. Whether this comes from one of them I very much doubt, but it made me think: "Blessed is the man who knows his own weakness, for this knowledge becomes for him the foundation, the root, and the beginning of all goodness.... When a man knows he is in need of divine help, he offers up many prayers" (Isaac the Syrian). You don't need to be strong or self-sufficient, because the point of life, as I said to one of my friends frustrated by MND last week, is not to achieve, but to be loved and to love. To be more precise, it's to be loved by God and to love him.

What's the point?

Sometimes I get an email which really makes me examine what I believe and why. Recently someone wrote. He'd read my article in the Guardian about Stephen Hawking's view that believing in heaven was a fairy story for people "afraid of the dark" ("I'd stake my life that Stephen Hawking is wrong about heaven"). He thought I might have something wise to say in the face of the apparent meaninglessness and randomness of life - and asked me how I regarded the prospect of death. Sometimes you get the sense that a person is raising awkward questions just to trip you up - but not in this case.

So during these wonderfully sunny warm autumnal days, I thought about my answer and this was a large part of it:

"To be honest most of the time I feel very small and vulnerable in a vast and perplexing universe. I think you have expressed the ultimate questions well and succinctly. To shuffle off this mortal coil, as Shakespeare put it, for another transcendental existence or else to be snuffed out for good seems a kind of waste and a denial of the rich sense of meaning that we have in our present existence. I can understand why some people choose to believe in reincarnation, so that there's at least some continuity of biological life. 

"You probably know the 17th century Englishman's famous description of life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". You aren't alone in struggling! I have no idea where you're coming from philosophically or personally, so I hope you will excuse me if I tread on any of your cherished notions. I don't mean to. As I've indicated, I don't feel I have all the answers. I feel more like I'm on a journey of exploration - which some people find an uncomfortable experience, but just happens to be the case with me. 

I identify with the poet who wrote: 

'We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.'

 That means that I'm on a journey of exploration in my disease - and of course it started before then! - which will lead to my death, I know. However, as I indicated in my Guardian article, I don't believe it will end there, which relates to where it started. As I wrote then, it was at university that I examined the evidence for the resurrection, in particular of Jesus Christ, and couldn't find any convincing reason that it didn't happen. The case for the defence was overwhelming. The documents were historically sound, the tomb was empty, no body was ever produced, independent witnesses saw him, hundreds of them, the disciples changed, and the Christian church 'happened'. The case was well argued by the leading lawyer, Professor Norman Anderson. If it was true, then the idea that life ends with death falls apart.  

"believing in nothing is just as
problematic!"

"However there's more to a journey than having one radical idea! Intellectually I didn't find it hard to believe in God. Certainly He can't be proved, but believing in nothing is just as problematic. I suppose you could say that my faith was largely cerebral for some years. It made sense. Its morality wasn't easy but was compelling. I reckoned it provided the most compelling worldview on offer. It was that in the end that took me into the priesthood. I won't bore you with a step-by-step account of the journey, but just point out a couple of milestones on the way. One was being diagnosed with ALS/MND nine years ago. That took me into a world of profound and disturbing questions, about meaning and suffering - I suppose to do with what you describe as randomness. But the other happened about seven years earlier. That was what I can only describe as an unexpected encounter with the Spirit of God when I was overwhelmed with the love of Jesus Christ. The effect it had on me was to transform my largely intellectual faith into a life conviction. It also meant that when my diagnosis came I had a different perspective on the questions concerning suffering and so on. I suppose I'd had long enough to prove that not only did faith make sense but it also worked in practice. And I'd also found that I was not alone in life.

"So although I've not had answers to all the perplexing questions, I've been given a sense that life is not pointless or random. I know that the process of dying will not be simple or pleasant for me, but so far the hard things of my life have had unexpectedly positive outcomes. I think if you stop learning and stop striving to learn then you've an impoverished approach to life. As for the nature of life after death - well, the two compass points I go by are the accounts of the nature of the risen Jesus, whose body had a continuity with his body before death; it was tangible and recognisable, yet transformed, unlimited and superior. That seems to indicate that there's a continuity between us as we are and us as we shall be. The second compass point is that Jesus seemed to indicate that there will be 'a new, or renewed, creation'; in other words there will be some sort of continuity between existence as we know it now and existence as it's going to be. Somehow everything won't go to waste or be lost to oblivion.  

"Recently I've read something a truly wise man wrote about spiritual life. He compares life to a race; it has a start and an end. Its 'rules' are quite confusing. But God wants everyone to "win": 'So don't just listen to people talking or writing about religion. Some do it well, others do not. When they are concerned only with the externals of religion, they make it all sound so boring. Listen again...: "the best way to explain it is to do it". So get involved, even if your attempt to do so seems a blundering one.'

"I'd say something similar, like I feel I've been invited on this journey into the unknown, and all I know is that I've been invited by supreme Love. I'm relying on Him. I left a line out of that poem earlier:

'With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.' That's what makes the difference.

"I don't know whether that's of any help."