Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with a brief scene where three witches, the Norns of Scandinavian mythology, allude to Macbeth’s future:
When the hurlyburly’s done.
When the battle’s lost and won.
We each spend the whole course of lives with the hurlyburly, with the battle, with the ever-present, daily struggle to live and to live well.
It is our duty, our doom, our fate. The Genesis story describes it as a kind of punishment for the first man (3:17-19):
Cursed is the ground because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.
Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you,
and you shall eat the grass of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.
Our busy lives are driven not only by our desire to conform them to the will of God but also out of a sense of responsibility for ourselves and others and for the world in which we live.
When in the course of our lives we have done all that is humanly possible, have achieved all that we possibly can, at the end we have to shift gears.
At the end, all is out of our control. We’re in unfamiliar territory. The rules have changed.
We face the unknown, the final stage of our lives with a mixture of helplessness and confidence, blindness and insight, fear and trust, weakness and strength, resistance and acceptance, turmoil and peace.
When the hurlyburly of our life is done, when for better or for worse our life’s battle is over, when whatever victory we have achieved is past, we are called to a final, total surrender. This abandonment to the mercy and love of God is the final challenge of our earthly life.
But, till that end comes, we still have to work, bear burdens, struggle to do what is right, and patiently endure.
A farmer may trust that God will bring growth and fruitfulness to the seed, but the farmer needs to work—to plow, prepare, plant, cultivate, and be vigilant through spring and summer till harvest.
Dying is hard and challenging, not because we lack faith, hope, love, or trust in the love and mercy of God, but because we’re used to living “by the sweat of your brow”; we’re used to defining our lives by our doing, working, accomplishing, achieving.
In the sometimes exaggerated tales of saints, they sometimes sound ethereal, childlike, and floating in a sort of never-never land. But, that’s not real life.
We live with total confidence in God—but to live means to work, strive, sacrifice, love, enjoy, give thanks, aid, assist, achieve, create, and many other things.
As Ecclesiastes would say, there is a time for living, and a time for dying. We are very used to and have much experience of the time for living, but we have no personal experience of the time for dying before that unique time comes.
When that day comes, the paradox is our life’s battle, too, will be both lost and won. We’re called to fight the good fight of life to the very end, and then we’re called to surrender ourselves to God.
28 March 2021