No star chart could have predicted this...

no matter what “this” might be...

I have no recollection of writing the Focused Moment around which this first post in this series is centred. But, if I hadn’t written it yet, if I was still in active ministry, and if I was still doing a six-week Academy Awards themed Perspective(s)¹ series, I most certainly would have written it next January. Absolutely would have written it then.

The Perspective(s) given over the first six weeks of next year, were I still in ministry, would be focused on six of the films nominated for this year’s Best Picture category at the Oscars, a program we undertook annually at West Hill. Choosing the films was always a wee challenge. I needed to have the list finalized in December so I could get a flyer prepared, notifying congregational members and allowing them time to view the films. That meant, however, that I was choosing which movies to include before the award nominations were announced! It was always a guessing game and, most of the time, I hadn’t yet seen the films myself. Usually, the buzz was pretty solid, though, and only once did I choose a film that wasn’t nominated. I defend my choice by noting that Merle Streep was involved. (I should have worked the stats, though; it was a musical.)

This coming January, Ryan Gosling’s film, Hail Mary will absolutely be nominated, even if only for the longest film starring a rock. It’s also only the third film I’ve watched in a theatre since COVID so I may have been a little dazzled by the whole light show in deep space thing that was going on. But it was a remarkable movie and all about what this Focused Moment tries to share, despite it having been written fifteen years before the announcement of Hail Mary’s nomination will even take place.

You see, Ryland Grace, played by Gosling, had a plan for his life and it wasn’t where the movie finds him: teaching science to grade schoolers. It also wasn’t where the movie takes him. Like most of us, he didn’t end up doing what (when he was six or ten or fifteen or even when the movie opens) he wanted to do. When the movie opens, he’s somewhere far from where he had once hoped his life would be, and as it progresses, he ends up even further. Which sort of turns out to be closer, if you can imagine that kind of a plot twist.

Screenshot: Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary. Amazon MGM Studios

Life doesn’t work like we want it to. It never has. We might take a look at what we want to do with this one, inimitable life, and we might make a good choice, learn about it, still like it, and do everything we can to get to do it. But even all that effort won’t guarantee we’ll end up spending our lives doing that thing we really really really wanted to do. After all our preparation, we might end up hating it. We might not be able to find a job that allows us to practice it. We might not be able to afford doing it because of where we live. We might fall in love with someone and move half-way around the world for that love, half-way landing us in exactly the one place where that thing we most love doing is not practicably possible for any number of impossibly stupid reasons. We might get sick or someone we love might need us to be nearby and we end up having to go home, a place we thought we’d left forever. Few are those who script their lives and get to live the script.

Ryland Grace is a teacher. He seems to enjoy it and it seems he is good at it, but we’re not really sure. Maybe he likes teaching and maybe he wishes he’d been recognized for his uber-Mensa level brain and the very cool stuff he once loved coming up with. Nevermind. He’s liked and he seems to enjoy what he does. It has value for him and for the kids he’s teaching. Leave him be.

Fate’s having none of that. He’s plucked from the simple constancy of his life and invited to do something that will cost him everything. He refuses.

As it turns out, there is no refusal.

Until our final breath, Life never has the grace to just leave us alone. It picks us up, distracts us, drops us next to someone who will change our lives for good or ill whether we want them to or not. Life lulls us into a false sense of security and then breaks our hearts. It waves its arm across unfamiliar vistas and beckons us away from home. And it both opens doors and slams them shut, usually to great effect.

We don’t choose most of the things that happen in our lives. All the great plans, the lists, the places we’re sure we’ll go and the things we know we’ll accomplish have a way of eluding us, defeating us, out-running us. Mostly, we just survive. It’s the lucky among us who are able to thrive, not the prepared. No one can prepare for what Life hands them. But, in the end, all of us survive the length of our lives, don’t we? No matter what Life has handed us. No matter where Life has taken us. No matter where it leaves us.

Ryland Grace doesn’t get to choose, either. He gets bundled off, unconscious, and wakes up in a scenario he doesn’t even remember being offered. It is horrific, terrifying, and overwhelming but it is, as they say, what it is. And he reckons with that. There is a deep, deep lesson in that. The lesson is not the one you might think it is. It is not to give up and just let others decide what happens in your life. That was just the movie script, not the lesson. The lesson is to live, no matter where you end up, to truly make it your own and become wholly yourself in the work of that becoming.

Wilderness of the unknown. Photo: Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash

Most of the time, we don’t control what’s happening to or around us. We can make choices; of course, we can. But only a only a small fraction of them will have been made with all the knowledge needed to make them well. And all our choices play out against a backdrop of infinite chaos composed of all the other lives around us, each moving just as quickly as is our own, and the rest of everything, a wilderness of the unknown. We edged our way toward where we are right now through an amalgam of possibilities, most of which we were able to neither choose nor control … The circumstances of our birth. The transmission of familial genes, norms, beliefs, goods. The strength of our relationships. Our health trajectory - its beginnings and its unfolding. The schools we had access to and the teachers within them. The foods we ate as children and the foods we favour now. The politics and prejudices of our communities, our country. The world around us and the security we do or do not know. The maturity of the people caring for and teaching us and their ability to discern right from wrong. Our access to green spaces and our opportunities to interact with the natural world. The wonder and the tragedy of our biggest choices, often made when we are still figuring life out. The strength of our friendships and the depth of connections we make with others.

We don’t write out the moments of growth we need, the things we have yet to learn. We couldn’t. We don’t create a spectacular life by writing out a list of what we want to do and setting about doing it, helpful though that seems when we’re fourteen. We can’t land at what we “are meant” to do by reading horoscopes, studying star charts, or making choices based on whims or, worse, other people’s strongly held convictions. We live our lives accommodating our hopes, dreams, and plans to the realities we meet in each and every moment and we learn along the way. Things get lost and things get found. And we end up right where we find ourselves, creating our lives one day, one decision, one offering at a time.

Divination star chart. MiraCosic, Pixaby.

Whatever situation in which we find ourselves, whatever the challenges, limitations, uncertainties may be, we can still, with the same deep and lasting humanity with which Ryland Grace faces his reality, make the choice to step into possibility with an open heart, shouldering the challenges that will come, as they always do, and welcome the crafting of our lives through the circumstances surrounding us and through which we prevail. The wonder of life offering itself up to us each new day.

It’s not as though we shouldn’t try to plan it, try to make choices that help us fulfill our brave list of dreams. But a life becomes itself by being lived each and every day. And every moment is an opportunity to embrace it. Every moment is enough to make it our own. And every step we take into the future writes the journey for us, plots it out on our lifeline, and finds us exactly where we now stand, ready for tomorrow.

It’s not as though
we stop and start our way through life,
jerking this way and that,
half yanking our feet from one course
and onto another.

It’s not as though
we go so far and then,
consulting our maps, make a sudden turn
and head off in a new direction.

It’s not as though
we choose each new beginning
from a menu of life’s options.

And yet,
each moment opens soft and pure
awaiting our response;
each day lifts its head from the dew-strung grasses
and offers new hope, new possibility, extra chances;
each idea stirs a constellation of thoughts into being
and we are captivated by their courses.

May we know and celebrate new beginnings
in our lives and the lives of others
and as we do,
may we honour what has passed
and hallow its traces
through our lives, our hearts, our loves.

To this we commit ourselves
as those who begin anew this day.

Dew-strung grasses. Photo: Gretta Vosper

1. Commonly referred to as “sermons”.