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Living Fulfillment

By Charles Rush

December 21, 2008

[ Audio (mp3, 5.9Mb) ]

ristmas is coming and the waiting is about to do my granddaughters in… They are both 2ish and one of them will circle back to the tree, circle back to the tree and then run to rip open a package. And my grandson Charlie, almost 1, has yet to see an ornament or light that he didn't want to pull down. I'm waiting for the whole tree to come tumbling over anytime now.

Expectation and fulfillment are wonderful like that aren't they? When I was in college, we had a wall on the quad of the campus, where all the boys sat in order to watch the girls on their way to the post office. We first noticed something was up when one of the baseball players on my hall was seen working on his appearance in front of the mirror day after day. Every time we would bust his chops about his neat clothes, he would punch us from behind. This went on for a while and one day we are sitting on the wall with all of the other moron jocks that made up my fraternity, doing the same moronic jokes that moronic jocks find so amusing. Out of nowhere, the lovely Ann Robinson walks by and waves, not at any of us, but behind us where the baseball player is standing.

He hops over the wall, pulls a couple sheets out of a notebook and say, “Hey, I have those notes for you that I promised”… Notes? Education? No, there must be some kind of mistake here. We stood there with mouths agape.

The lovely Ann Robinson turned and said, ‘Thanks, that's sweet.' Mr. Baseball nodded, like he carried spare notes all the time for Anthropology 221. We all stood there slack jawed… until one of us said, ‘Scott, that's so sweet'. ‘It's all so sweet.' Aaaahhh! And all of us got punched out.

Expectation, promise, the chase… it is wonderful and life giving. He actually graduated, largely because of her, and they have three wonderful children today. Looking back, you can see that moment of fulfillment in the making.

Birth is like that too, almost always, almost intrinsically so. Birth is almost always full of that mysterious wonder of life. In the long, course of human history, there have been so many of these relationships like the young Mary and Joseph, leaving aside the miraculous part of the story. They matched one dumb young man- a boy really- and one nutty young woman, just barely figuring out how to do life and hardly schooled in the complexities of love, way over their heads- not enough financing, not enough planning, making this up as they go, in difficult circumstances, medically dangerous situations, often at odds with each other over the course of the previous few weeks… And then, and then, labor starts and everything changes.

Especially with birth of that first one, both of them almost always have this “O Lord” moment. You suddenly know- I mean you really know- that quite in spite of anything and everything that you bring to the table, you are awash in the fundamental goodness of the world. You know you are way over your head, just holding this newborn child, you know you are way over your head. But it is still so absolutely marvelous that you can't really believe that this is happening to YOU.

It is one those moments that you are radically open to God and the future. It is such a natural time to ask for God's blessing as you go, to promise that you will follow the star where it leads, to depend on God's wisdom and grace for your life. You know that you are not up to this task and that you will need supernatural resources to get this done. And it is such a big responsibility and you are so lucky to have been chosen to shoulder it. You feel so unworthy and incapable and inexpressibly grateful at the same time. It is humbling and hope-filled.

This was the mind-set of our young couple starting out and that was without any of the special promise that rested upon this child. The Angels sang round about them “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards all people with whom God is pleased”…

That is the nature of fulfillment. It is one of those days when everything just falls into place, when the big gates to Oz swing open, and before you starts a road that wends into a hope filled future.

Christians have always celebrated the nature of fulfillment on the same day that we lift up the wonder of love. Spiritually speaking, the two of them are intrinsically connected. I remember one day about ten years ago, I was in the midst of a bunch of things happening and I thought to myself, “these are the good old days.” These are the days I will look back on warmly. Have you ever had a moment like that? Have you ever caught yourself recognizing the fulfillment in your life? Have you thought to yourself, silently, this is as good as it gets… for me. Usually you are afraid to actually say it because it might be a jinx. Sometimes we need a breakthrough just to realize what we are living.

In the Movie “Family Man” Nicholas Cage has a moment right after college when he gets a big internship in London. His girlfriend goes with him to the airport, tries to talk him out of going, because she senses that it will be a fate-filled trip. He goes anyway… It is fate-filled and he leads his own life, becomes a guy's guy, big career, they never get back together, and each of them gets on with the rest of their lives.

One day, he wakes up, living another life. He is living the life he would have had, if he had gotten off that plane and not taken the ‘me and my career path'. Much of this new life he is living is appalling. He lives here in Union, New Jersey. He sells tires for his father-in-law. He is in a bowling league. He picks up the family checkbook and just grimaces.

The house is a wreck. There is a dog, a cat, a gold fish. He looks just like himself, but he is not this man. So he spends a lot of time, trying to figure out what he is supposed to be saying and what he is supposed to be doing, what he would have been had he taken a different road… And much of the time, he is trying to figure out how to get his old life back.

He has children now. They are cute, adorable. They move him, but not enough to want to leave his old life. His job is a horror and so beneath his skill set, it drives him crazy.

But, he is magnetically attracted to his wife. She is as wonderful as she was in college. Actually, check that, she has gotten so much more complex and vibrant and engaged. He didn't realize the half of what she was going to become and he begins to spiritually awakening to this fact.

At one point in the movie, there is some break from the normal chaos of the daily family routine. His wife grabs him and starts kissing him. He is kissing her back. Suddenly she is kind of frisky and she wants him to repeat a line that he always says to her when they are kissing. Of course, he doesn't know what this line is, so he fumbles around for a minute to buy some time. His old self is meeting his new self… He thinks of what he would say, blurts out something “hot” and then… everything comes to a stop… His wife looks up at him in confusion… then anger… then hurt.

She slides from beneath his embrace. The moment is gone. She pulls back and looks at him like she is looking at a stranger. Of course, she is looking at a stranger, she just doesn't know it. And he has this moment of spiritual awakening.

At this moment, he is wishing more than anything in the world that he knew this little line that they shared with each other. He is wishing more than anything in the world that he had something intimate to share with her. He wants to rewind the tape. He just doesn't want to hurt her. He doesn't want to disappoint her.

He knows how beautiful she was, how beautiful she is. But suddenly this is more than just beauty. He wants to fulfill her. He wants to be the key that unlocks all of the radiant, inexpressible joy that is inside of her. He wants to bring that to life. Spiritually speaking, he is awakening to the actual profound life of love.

He starts going back and forth in his mind, in the two lives that he has lived simultaneously. And he starts to realize that life is not about the big perq's at the spa with the expensive wine and cigars any more than it is about ‘the bowling league Christmas party out in Union, New Jersey'. Poor New Jersey. Life is not about being the guy in charge any more than it is feeling cruddy about yourself because you have a lame vocation in the family business that is not going much of anywhere.

At some point, he just presumes that he can't go back to his old life of power, so he just gives in and starts to live this new life. It snows one morning before Christmas, just like today. He takes his daughter outside in the front yard. He is pulling her around in the yard on her wee sled, doing donughts, throwing snow at each other. Finally, he falls on the ground in the snow right next to her. She looks over at him. She says, “I knew you'd come back”. Spiritually speaking, children are never fooled. They are more in touch with the life of love and less able to see the world in any other way. “I knew you'd come back”.

He looks back at her in that way that us men have a way of looking when we having a break-through from ‘absolutely clueless'- the way we live most of the time- towards something spiritually real. He looks up at his ‘blah' house in Union, NJ back at his daughter. Suddenly what they share is so deeply real and everything around them is so unimportant- whether it is cheap and tacky or whether it is hand-crafted and from Santa Fe… That is a spiritually transformative moment.

In the bible, Moses leads the people of Israel up to the Promised Land and says to them, “I put before you this day, the way of life and the way of death, choose life!” Most of us can't figure stuff out that abstractly. Most of us need it put a little more concretely. We need to look around us and have a break through moment when we see the people that are right around us and we can say to out loud, as profoundly as we are able to love, “I choose you”.

The deeper spiritual fulfillment that we are given to know in this life is accessed right through the people around you. In the midst of the chaos, in the midst of the confusion getting ready for everything to be right, love and fulfillment are waiting to express themselves right in your midst.

In the biblical story, God intervenes in history in this very majestic manner, with Angels singing, the heavens opening up, this royal announcement from on high. And what is it that God comes to announce with such fanfare? That the spiritual life is about actualizing and fulfilling love right around you, in your ordinary circumstances, wherever you are. That is the spiritual point of our lives, to realize that love is all around you… become part of it.

And that is your story too. When Jesus grew up and began teaching about the life of love and peace and forgiveness, he told his audiences, “you must be born again”. That is, most of us don't really get it the first time around. We are living but we are not accessing the deeper, more profound parts of living. We are more like existing, not realizing our potential or the potential of those around us, because we just don't get it. We have to screw it up before we realize what is not true, what doesn't work, what is only skin deep and not lasting.

The gift of the season is the possibility of having love and fulfillment take root right around us. The gift of the season is that, quite in spite of our limitations and our inabilities, there is a divine gift of love that God wants to fill us with, opening our eyes and our imaginations to what is possible right around us. The gift of the season is that the ordinary can be transformed into something truly extraordinary. Let it happen. Let peace, joy, hope, and love fill you and yours. Change gears. Focus on what they need for their fulfillment and watch as God transforms all of you in the process.

And suddenly there was with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among all people with whom I am pleased.” Peace be with you. Amen.