We slice up experience into beginnings, middles and ends and draw lessons from the slices. We stock our mental shelves with these stories, often adding to or refreshing them according to what we sense our listeners would like. The Irish make a living from this. Reality at the cutting edge, however, is characterized by frayed ends and incomplete conclusions. Chaos is another word for it, one that we don’t like to use about our lives. But we walk a very thin line between cosmos (order) and chaos, and most of the order we put into things has a tendency to unravel very quickly. Even when we get the key to understanding its meaning, like Jesus’s poor parents, we don’t understand it. But he went back and lived with them anyway which, for the time, was evidently enough. In the self-discipline of Lenten meditation, which sharpens our daily awareness, we get deeper and more piercing glimpses into this provisionality of life and, strangely, we even find it reassuring.
