Sunday Morning

          I’m having a hard time this morning – too much sugar and excitement yesterday, I’m thinking.  So I’m wedged into the corner of the couch, trying to prepare my Sunday School lesson and considering the whole Sunday School thing: I have forty minutes to say something to kids who are thirteen and fourteen, something that will mean something to them.  Be significant.

            We do so much talking. (LOL – I do, anyway.)  Talk, talk, talk.  There’s something big out there, big and real and powerful, and we try to explain it to each other.  The way you’d give somebody directions through a maze.  Like somebody also still standing inside of a maze can be all that sure of her advice –

            What I want to do today is make them understand that what I’m trying to tell them is very real to me.  That it counts.  That it has meaning.  With my own kids, I had all the time in the world – and they watched me live what I was talking about.  There in that dull but neat church class room, I sit in a folding chair and make them keep all four feet of their folding chairs on the floor, and I talk at them.

            I was going to ask them this morning: things have meaning.  Do you know what meaning – means?  And once that question had popped into my head, I tried to answer it.  I found the process a little baffling. Go ahead.  Try yourself.

            I finally googled, the way I do with other words I’m trying to pin down – what do English speakers think meaning means?  It was impossible.  I found nothing but spirals of words, none of which focused on the meaning of meaning.  I tried significance – and they could give me sentences, but no real solid defining of the term.  I found that “important” was a commonly invoked cognate.  So I started thinking about that.

            Im-portant.  Im= prefix which indicates an odd range of (sorry) meaning: either “NOT” – as in im-possible –  or “toward”, as in “implode”?

                     And then –    -portent: something that predicts a significant (often scary or threatening) event. (my definitions, here) – often used mystically, as in a prophetic sign of some kind, predicting a catastrophic – to us, anyway – event.  Or, if not catastrophic – significant.

And we’re back at significant. It actually means the same exact thing – an act or word or event that is a sign of what will come next.  And the word always carries with it just a hint of warning.

What’s interesting to me here is that both of these words seem to have nothing to do with human will, human choice – not in their structure.  The future is in the hands of fate or Divine Power.  I guess, when I’m a mother, and I say, “If you don’t stop doing that . . . “  and I am the kind of person who follows through, then I have made in important or significant statement.  No, if I raise my eyebrow in a certain way – that fits better. 

But do not our own choices, no matter how small, end up being signs of what will follow in our lives (assuming we aren’t hit by a bus as we leave our front doors)?  Is not our own will, then, just as significant as a rainbow or certain lining up of stars?

Regardless— to us human mortals – it’s like everything points to the future.  The future is what we try to shape every minute.  We eat right so we won’t have heart attacks.  We wear helmets so we don’t end up in assisted living.  We save money so we can buy food in the future.  It’s the future we fear.  The possibilities.  Maybe the probabilities.  Yeah.  We play with probabilities, trying to tweak them by changing the variables.

So what do I say to thirteen year olds, who  – or so it seems to me – don’t really believe in the future (not past the moment of inheriting car keys) about the meaning of meaning?  All I can think of is: LIFE IS REAL.  NOT JUST YOUR LIFE.  I can point to my face and say – see these wrinkles??  YOU WILL HAVE THEM.  But they never saw me young.  They don’t know that the me now is worlds away from the me then.  They do NOT BELIEVE.  They think that now is forever.  And in that state, meaning really has no meaning.  Because I think that “meaning” comes down to the impact of the present on the future.  What you do today will have results – some good, some unimaginably awful.  And the game of the present is to make the choices in the moment that will result in good things in the future.  That will get you what you want.

But thirteen year olds have no idea what they want: not to be in trouble.  To be able to do whatever they want whenever they want and have it be fun the whole way.  They believe in a fantasy.  They believe in it wholeheartedly and heartily.  And they sit in their grounded folding chairs, waiting out the long, long forty minutes and hoping I’ll say “hell” twenty five times.  Hoping I’ll make them laugh.  I suppose that they allow themselves to be so grounded is a good thing – maybe.  If I were sitting in the other room, in the padded folding chairs, facing a grown-up filling up the time for me, I’d hope the same things, looking longingly at the window, and wishing it would open (magically, like a divine gift) so I could fly out of it.

I don’t know.  All I know is, portents aside, I’m going to have to make meaning in a little while.  Something beyond the ultimate meaning of portioning out hay.  And I’m not sure how I’m going to do it.