Dashes and Commas

...more on Religion and Spirituality

Experience is what actually happens in life while belief is reflection on the happening. Unfortunately too many of us spend more time reflecting and thinking about what happened and will happen rather than giving full attention to what is happening right now. We seem to be in a constant state of coming from and going to while, for the most part, oblivious to where we are. 

How many times have you been driving, walking, or going in some fashion only to realize that you've gone from point A to point C and can't remember B? Now think about this same dynamic in larger frames of time. What about yesterday, last week, or last year? Do you ever find yourself asking, "Where did the time go?" 

Because of my current location in Florida, where a lot of older people live, I've held a lot of funerals in the past couple of years. Occasionally a family requests that someone read a poem about this dynamic in our lives. It's called "The Dash" and is about the dash between a person's Born and Died dates. You can read it here.

The Christian religion even does this with Jesus albeit with a comma instead of a dash. The foundational creed of Christianity, "The Apostles Creed" reads, "...was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate..." Jesus's whole life experience is a comma. What a Christian is asked to "believe" is all about the past and the future. Ironically, the comma, or life of Jesus, is about living and loving in the present, which he calls "the Kingdom at hand."

Religion loves dashes and commas, Spirituality prefers run on sentences.