Quo vadis? Where are you going? Peter famously asked Jesus that question, just before the Crucifixion (John 13:36). Much more mundanely, I often ask myself that question first thing in the morning, perhaps with more pathos these days, when I’m exploring what it’s like to live in my nineties.
My bed in my tenth floor apartment is positioned so that I can look east out the window. And there, weather permitting, I can regularly see planes taking off from Boston’s Logan Airport at the horizon. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, I typically identify with the passengers on those planes and silently ask: where are you going?
I will ask you that question now, as a way of inviting you to come along on a lifelong spiritual adventure – or to realize anew that that’s what your life’s always been about. Quo vadis?
Think first about that old story about two peasants during the Middle Ages walking along a muddy road early in the morning. Someone asks them: where are you going? The first responds: “to work.” The second says: “I’m going to build the Cathedral at Chartres.”
Sadly, today, some, were they to be asked that question, would respond – nowhere. As a college chaplain, I used to hear that answer on occasion from distraught sophomores. They had been uprooted, many of them, from their familiar, if not always comfortable, home environments. They had found themselves, many of these bright teenagers, in a world where everybody, not just their teachers but also most of their fellow students seemed to “get it” much more intelligently than they did. I would characteristically interrupt their despair with a simple question. “Okay, forget about the fact that you can’t find your way around your chem lab for a moment, and tell me where you’re going.”
To many of those young students, that question didn’t help at all, at least at first. Typically, it left them speechless. Then I might tell them the story about the two medieval peasants walking along that muddy road. “Where are you going?” I’d ask them again. I could imagine any one of them thinking at that moment: “Hell, I came in here at least to get some sympathy for my struggles, and this guy’s speaking in riddles.”
Imagine yourself now, on one of those flights airing into the skies out of Logan Airport. Quo vadis?
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.