“Are you a Christian?” my friend asked, not as confrontation, but as invitation from one who intimately knows my spiral inward journey. I heard the chambers of my mind clang like iron gates, opening backwards through centuries of buried theologies I have embraced, rejected, embraced. Two thousand years of overlays, past early church fathers, mystics, holy men and women who addressed this question, to a time long ago when a small circle of believers stooped to draw a fish in the dirt rather than dare the question verbally. These early believers faced persecution and death if non-believers guessed their secret preference. My heart paused to soak  in this image.

This fish, drawn so simply in the dirt — a recognition beyond familiarity: Do you know him? Do you believe? Has your life changed because of him? I stood, silent, in my mind’s eye and strained to articulate my own journey with this image/question. Do I believe in Jesus’ principles, his searching, his steadfast heart, his final gamble and transition into something other? Has knowing Jesus changed my life? No words were shared by those early faithfuls as they drew this fish in the dirt, only recognition. Connection. Intimacy of the deepest kind.

There’s something mystical about an image. An image is more articulate than a verbal question. It connects with the heart. It unleashes the imagination and draws in the soul. I can join fully with you in an image without squabbling over details of the truth of it. Images open, whereas words can so often be, as Saint-Exupery suggested, “a source of misunderstanding.” My heart knows how to answer. My head knows better than to answer. My soul feels full in the silence of it.

How do you bridge the chasm of experience and inner journey between one person and another? How do you trace your inner knowings and articulate a mystery? How do you step into a spotlight whose blazing eye often sees only in black and white? Pontious Pilate washed his hands of it. People usually argue and take sides about it.

Only the image joins us in it. That’s why Jesus used images to speak a mystery — of shepherds and mustards seeds and wedding banquets. He knew the image could teach, could carry his listeners where they needed to go, would allow them to bathe in the mystery of it rather than be entrapped by the answer in it.The answer had to happen in the heart of the receiver. Jesus trusted the image to do that.

My own dance with the Jesus Question has been a lovely encounter. My attempt to articulate the mystery of who he is for me changes over time but the presence of him never wavers. When my  friend asked in earnest, “Are you a Christian?”, I felt safe and treasured. It was not a trick question or face-off, but an opportunity to reflect, to share our depths of soul.

Articulation of a mystery should be approached only if the intention is a joining. It is not in the agreement of the answer that we join, but in the promise to keep struggling until our question becomes inclusive rather than exclusive. The question should wander as the soul wanders, enjoying the shift of metaphors and meanings, leaving the imagination free to play. 

The early Christians teach us a lesson in dialogue: the image can lead us. If a representative of every faith expression on earth met in a room and worked together on an image of the transcendent until everyone in the room could agree on an image that was inclusive of their belief, there would be less territorialism. There would be a modernday Pentecost with every image offered seen in the native image of every seeker. 

Different theologies, one image. We could sit with one another in this image and be one. Not a meeting of the minds — no dogma distinguished — but a connection of the heart. Divine intelligence does indeed enter us through the heart, not mind. We could then, perhaps, move beyond the image to the experience of that holy transcendence beyond our naming. 

I am reminded of a poem my friend Bob wrote years ago that urges us to “praise the irrational, the sweet compulsion to unname the works of earth,” “to turn poets loose on dictionaries,” and “to keep one question always covered, to make tomorrow worth coming back for.”  

May we struggle to unname the truth of what we believe and to share in the sheer experience it affords us until we find ourselves in a new place of spiritual growth. It may be that we reaffirm our faith as it expresses itself today. It may be we go full circle, as T.S. Elliot says, and return again to the place we began and see it, “as if for the first time.” 

If someone stoops to draw a fish in the dirt and waits for your recognition, fall silent. Do not allow words to divide you. Struggle with the image in your soul until it is ready to speak.

                                                                                          WRITING OUR OWN CREDO

Writing our own credo — a living, organic statement of what we have come to believe — is an essential process in developing soul.

Like our forefathers who set out for America from Europe with the vision of placing the privilige of governing themselves “in the hands of the people,” I set out each day to redefine myself and my beliefs in light of my experience. The seeds of the civil rights movement, the Vatican II encounter, the Vietnam struggle of conscience, the women’s movement, have formed and fed my soul from my youth. These experiences empower me; I cannot imagine living by someone else’s perspective of truth.

The myths and sacred stories of my faith that fortified me as a child carry me still, like favorite photographs whose images I digest over and over in poetic delight. I am rooted in traditions of holy men and women whose learnings and experiences I scavage daily, trying them on for size and fit, wearing what nurtures me, discarding what does not.

The trail I leave is scattered with images and expressions upon which I feasted for years, then placed gently back down, ready for those who come after me in search of their own truth and nurturing. I prune lovingly, as I find traveling light leaves me open to new and more inclusive experiences. Often it is more a reframing or reimaging of the old rather than a complete discard of it. Different metaphors for those handed me in my childhood for truths still true.

The Tree of Good and Evil, the Tree of Knowledge, stands in my garden, shimmering. I dig gently around the roots of this tree, marveling in all past expressions of belief, all music, all poetry, all sacred effort to name the Unnamable, soaking in what nurtures, passing over in silent respect what does not. Like Moses, I seek out and determine what brings life and what brings death to me on a daily basis, with one ear aways cocked in faithful attention to an inner voice.

Writing a personal credo should only be attempted in sand. It changes often, as each new taste of the divine washes over us in waves of wonder. “This is who I am today. This I believe today.” It is the language of poetry, of music, of art, of all bold attempts to harness soul.

Credo is not church. Church is home, a comfort station, a mother. Church gives structure, a place to gather and to tell our stories of God, a community of support and shared expressions of faith, a safe haven in which children can be taught all the wisdom stories that jump-start and root their own journey of spirit. Children need structure, modeling, stories, guidance, nurturance of soul and the witness of families who live out their faith.  Leaving home and finding ones identity is not the work of children, nor should it be.

Credo is not knowledge. It is about lived experience. Knowledge is of the head, what we know to be true because it has been proven, made manageable. Credo is of the heart, of the soul, what we have come to believe because of our own journey and the shared journey of those who long to join with spirit and hear its wisdom.

Credo leaps to my lips as I take my early morning walk, when everything is still and just waking up, before I step into my cerebral world. Credo moves within me as I listen to my clients’ lives. Credo holds me close as I grieve the death of someone I love. It breathes and laughs and weeps as I do. It compels me forward and instructs me later upon reflection.

Our credo will be as rich as our pursuit of it. To put a face on God we will have to stop putting a limit on God and allow God to find us in ways we cannot now imagine, through art perhaps, or music or nature or cinema or work. We have to allow our soul to wander as restlessly as feet in search of communion with that sacred other, no matter where we find that.

We must push our questions to their limit, to the very edge of imagination — keep them fluid and interesting — and when they reach one limit, push them out farther, until they open out to more creativity and wonder. We don’t have to dump what we now believe, but to reinterpret it, expand it, freeing it up from dry, flat, automatic statements of belief that no longer fit our lived experience.

When Jesus ate with sinners or blessed the “poor in spirit,” he was recognizing those who lived on the edge of established belief, those who knew they didn’t “have it,” but were grateful for God’s meeting them where they were until they did “get it.” Be, then, always on the way. Ask  questions, pay special attention to burning bushes, don’t be afraid of “I don’t know,” and be ready at every moment to throw everything you think you know into the air and to begin anew.

                                                                                 RELIGION

From the beginning, humankind has attempted to address the light in the darkness, to call it by name, to be in relationship with it. The light brings with it questions with no easy answers: Who are we? Why are we here? What does it mean?

Early man, according to Eliade, felt truly alive only when he conformed his personal actions, in ritual, to model some archetypal hero who performed the same act “in illo tempore”, in the beginning. He possessed an unconscious sense of the transparency of life, as if he was participating in something larger than his mind could grasp, yet his body knew, by the aliveness he experienced at those moments. He knew, on some level, this aliveness gave his life meaning.

This aliveness is the medium of religious experience. This aliveness is the presence of the sacred — the eternal that pulses all of life yet remains invisible to the human eye. This aliveness is the light in the darkness that reveals the sacred energy that releases us, in turn, from captivity of every kind, heals our woundedness, and opens our mind to higher consciousness.

Religion, in all its religious forms, is an attempt to call humankind to this deeper act of living, to being conscious, while still living on the earth, of this aliveness that pulses through man from an eternal source. It proclaims to its believers there is a pattern of living that, if one follows this pattern, there’s a better chance one will have a deeper, more joyous experience of life.

Religion is an attempt to speak to that part of man that is eternal and to nurture his connection with the divine. Early man experienced the rapture of being alive most exquisitely in ritual, in dance, in all the rich ways he reached out to that which he knew was larger than his own being. Religious ritual is an attempt, in contemporary form, to do just that – to pitch us out, beyond ourselves, to open up places within us we cannot in ordinary behaviors.

Earlier civilizations created myths to serve as metaphors for what can not be grasped but what is experienced by every human – birth, suffering, jealousy, love, death. Religious creed, code and cult attempt to systematize and sanitize these archetypal experiences. The transcendent, however, evades anything concrete or literal.

The safety of knowing stops the journey. The journey stops when one gets more interested in answers than in the questions. Religion is a starting point, not a sanctuary. The story of being put out of the Garden suggests this impossibility of a permanent resting-place. We are wired to outgrow where we are, commissioned to follow the divine wherever it leads, to wander mountain tops and deserts in search of this nameless reality.

In the end, all we have is mystery, and wonder. Inasmuch as we can rest in the unknowable, we will experience joy at the Center. We move from Center into the duality that expresses the whole and we do the only thing we can do. We dance to the aliveness that is life and we sing the song of consciousness as it awakens slowly in our being. The experience of this is more important than the articulation of this.

We are spiritual beings. We enter into relationship with divine energy in our innermost soul. We also long for outward expressions of this inner dynamic. Religion is the outward expression of the inner faith and belief of a community who come together to celebrate this belief. There is no one true religion; each religion speaks its truth for its time and its society. Spirituality is an inner relationship; religion is an outer expression agreed upon by the members who come together.

If religion can speak and not be too literal, if it can instill wonder and not be too invested in outcomes, if it can nurture its children and not be angry should they leave home, then religion will be a servant among us and point to that which is larger than ourselves. The more transparent religion can be – the more it points to something or someone larger than itself – the more it will be what it originally meant to be, a linking back to that mystery we long for in our deepest heart.

                                                            A CLEAN PIPELINE

All human life comes through the birth canal. So do all human institutions and cultural traditions, even church.

We receive a tradition, a religion, from our family, our culture. Everything we receive comes through a pipeline — a preordained, organized framework of beliefs and presuppositions that someone else formulated as true, for that period and place. It has a history; it evolved over time. This is as it should be, as parents and elders want to pass on what they consider important to their young. This offers our young a ground, a foundation from which to journey.

The problem comes when we are unconscious of how our inherited beliefs shape our perceptions and our choices, or are unaware of the history of how they came to us. We tend to accept only what conforms to our worldview, our pipeline, even if this pipeline isn’t pure, is contaminated by bias. Age brings with it the responsibility to return to the source, the beginnings, to the history of a thing, in order to understand how it came to be what it is. It might be helpful to review a short history of how humankind came to identify sacred energies.

Archaic man, as previously mentioned, projected the light outward, on to mythical gods who held the energy man did not. The Greeks began to study the light, thought man could know the light, like Plato’s images on the wall of the cave. These, too, were outside man. Hebrews introduced faith, the notion of light as Light, with the possibility of a relationship with this sacred other. Christianity witnessed to the light it saw in Jesus; then took it back and put the light in the church.

The birth of science came with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Then Descartes placed the light in the principles of scientific materialism and the mind. We post-moderns, a conglomerate of all the above, tend to place the light in medical progress, technology, in outside interventions that promise to improve the quality of life. 

Go back to even earlier accounts — early creation stories – to review our history. God called light out of darkness, in one fashion or another, modeled for us how this occurs – with the mystery of birth, with the cycles of earth and sky, with the evolution of humankind from unconscious to conscious being. Why would God show us how to call light out of darkness if God did not build into the universe itself the possibility of light continuously emerging from the darkness, in whatever form this takes?

God, Life, the Universe, showed us how to do this, continues to show us how to do this. But we keep projecting outside ourselves – projecting the light outside ourselves – on the fickle gods of progress, science, medicine, addiction, anyone or anything other than ourselves. One of my clients said to me, in earnest, “I’ve always wanted someone to make my life come true.”

This, I believe, is what Jesus tried to do – to make our life come true. Jesus proclaimed that the light, the kingdom, the presence of the sacred, is in us, in our human person. We found that too hard to believe, blasphemous in fact, so we made Jesus into God. We couldn’t then, and find it hard now to believe that the light is in us. We built a church and put Jesus above us. The light was in Jesus, but not in us. We’re merely human.

Our pipeline – the belief into which we are born – is contaminated by our false sense of unworthiness and by our desire to have someone, something else provide this light for us. We continue to believe our saving grace is outside ourselves, when, in reality, it has been within us all along. This, perhaps, is what coming to consciousness is all about. And why it’s so hard.

If it’s up to us to save ourselves, we cry out, then we will surely fail. No, it must be in technology, in religion, in medical interventions, in science, in government’s ability to make a safer world. Until we are willing to “steal the fire of the gods” – again and again – to release the sacred light within ourselves on a one-by-one basis, we will continue to project outside ourselves and be content to see ourselves as lacking resources and waiting for a savior.

We resist the God in us, resist claiming the sacred energy within; we want someone else to take responsibility. God keeps trying to give the job away; we keep giving it back. We draw up laws we identify as God’s, project evil on the outside of us, and then build churches to keep us safe.

Having been raised Catholic, religion graced me with powerful symbols and liturgies and scriptures that fill my soul today. My metaphors have evolved, that’s all — my scriptures, my liturgies. My grandchildren are scriptures, nature my daily liturgy. These gift me with revelations of God’s nearness. By changing metaphors and meanings, I can choose to belong to a particular church or not. My “church” has taken on the circumference of life itself.

I seek the God of Jesus. If religion offers that, I listen. If music offers that, I listen. If a walk in nature allows me that, I listen. When that voice speaks to me within my soul, I listen. 

Religion can be an external force that instructs the soul, or it can be an internal force that emanates from soul. I prefer a middle ground, a marriage of the two.

                                                                  GOD SPEED

My father died believing it was more important to cling to his belief in the Catholic Church than to trust where that journey leads. He perceived my siblings’ switch to other religious denominations in their adult, married life as a failure on his part, as something to grieve. He considered loyalty to a religion more important than a vital, dynamic spiritual life.

The late Anthony de Mello once said, when it comes to religion, we are all like “frogs caught in a well.” Each religious metaphor or denomination is a separate well. God is outside, beyond the Baptist well, the Hebrew well, the Catholic well. Seeking the God beyond our well is the journey through and beyond all the masks of God, to the God beyond all metaphor.

“All religion is true,” said Joseph Campbell, “for its time.” The metaphors or masks of God change over generations, throughout different cultures, as we can only speak in metaphor about the transcendent energy or presence we experience at the core of life. Religion means “linking back,” as religion is an attempt to put a face or word or ritual on something larger than the human dimension, even our categories of thought.  

Metaphors change over time, for every culture, for every human being, as the transcendent energy beyond time and space can only speak to and inform each person in their own categories of thought or experiences of wholeness. A wise spiritual leader knows how to use metaphor and story and contemporary experience to touch the heart and soul of the one who is sitting before them, asking them a question, experiencing a devastating loss.

I think that’s what the story of the first Pentecost tried to convey. It was how the Spirit spoke to different peoples “in their own tongue,” in their own metaphors, so they could hear the truth they needed to hear that convinced the apostles Jesus had risen — not the empty tomb. Jesus told them they would know he had risen when they saw the Spirit working among them. Religion’s task is to be open to the interpretation of the many truths it tries to put in words, to allow the imagination and the flow of metaphor to enrich the truths, not imprison them.

It’s when the metaphor becomes frozen — True for all time — that the difficulty arises. The truth beneath the metaphor – the reality to which the metaphor points, the truth about which the metaphor speaks – is true, but the metaphor used to talk about it changes with consciousness and experience and the spiritual dynamic of the imagination.

Kahlil Gibran says it well: “Say not, ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.” Say not ‘I have found the path of the soul.’ Say rather, ‘I have met the soul walking upon my path.’ For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, but unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.” The unfolding of the spiritual imagination awakens the soul.

If we trusted the spiritual imagination to serve the Spirit, we would say, “Jesus said it this way,” not “Jesus said…” Jesus was exquisite in his use of metaphor to tell the story, to reveal the truth. He knew the image would carry his listener to wherever the listener needed to go to hear the truth that would speak to him. Jesus trusted the Spirit to do the interpreting. He was only clear or definite when explaining to his apostles, “in private.”

We help young people develop a healthy spiritual life by asking them about their experience of God, how they would describe the ways God touches their lives right now. This imaginative approach to God is expansive, not constrictive. When we talk to them about God in ways that touch their imagination, we captivate their hearts. They experience it rather than learn it. By doing this, however, we allow them to follow where their imagination leads. Even if it leads them to another religious denomination or religious ritual.

The more we encourage our youth to explore the imagination and its interface with tradition – our collective memory of God as church – the more dynamic their experience of God will be. Religion should point to God’s presence among us, not point to itself. This suggests images and rituals that emerge from our personal experience of a personal God, rich with imagination and play.

Religion, to use another metaphor, becomes a road map we give our youth, a tried and true way through the forest, citing dangers and pitfalls and successful passages. To help youth develop a healthy spiritual life, their personal spiritual life, would be like individually taking them into the forest and encouraging them to develop an inner compass that will assist them in facing the challenges they will personally encounter on their journey to the God beyond our knowing. 

This inner compass would enable them, when we are no longer around, to find their own way through the maze. Both are important for our youth – an external religion and a personal internal compass. Should our youth misplace the map, they will have that internal compass to find their own way home.

Caroline Myss said, so long as our heart, mind, higher self is managed by the tribal will – those from whom we receive our metaphors and truths – we will move at the tribal speed and not at our own “spirit speed.” We will miss the urgings of the God within us. We will move with our mind towards the experience of God rather than an awe-filled imagination that awakens soul.

My father might have delighted in his children’s journey to God had he been taught that imagining God in as many ways as we can, and celebrating that, is grace rather than disloyalty. The church in which we celebrate is not as important as our personal encounter with God. It is, as de Mello suggests, a well from which we draw our first encounter. Important, but not an end in itself.

To my father’s credit, had he not played the devil’s advocate in everything except religion, I might not have learned to love the questions as I do. Thanks, Dad.

The magic of the Advent season — the church’s time of waiting before Christmas — was always dramatized for me by the lighting of the candle in the darkened church and the yearning chant of the music: “Emanuel, Emanuel, who are we that you should love us so well?” The stories of angels with messages for Mary and Joseph and the shepherds spoke to me of listening and paying attention to the messengers in my own life who herald the next clue in my spiritual journey.

Those images carry me today and spill over into other areas of my believing. I am moved still by the telling of how God creating me in God’s own image; that, when I misplaced this message, God came again, in the person of Jesus, to remind me that my body carries God within; that we are all — as Meister Eckart said — “mothers of God.”  I strain to hear the voice within who longs for me to love myself as She loves me, and, in particular, for me to love my body.

Our bodies are pregnant with messengers, angels who herald new truths of who we are and what is best for us. Being with the mystery of our body is routinely ignored in our culture in favor of  external success and recognition. My clients often complain that their bodies “betray” them by weeping when they least expect or want, by breaking down when they push themselves too arduously, that their bodies are “too hungry,” “too needy” when it comes to emotional wants.

What is the body doing in these instances, if not trying to shepherd my clients to more safe grounds of wellness? Why would the body weep, or need, or want, if it didn’t know a truth about us we have overlooked or trivialized or ignored for other, more acceptable responses? Our bodies are, indeed, our contemporary angels, sending messages of mighty importance we can no longer relegate to dark basements of ignorance.

So many today speak of these things: the movement toward holistic medicine, the works of  Marion Woodman, James Hillman, the whole spiritual thrust of learned people who encourage daily dialogue with our bodies. Our feelings are messengers who speak to us of how we’re doing, what we’re needing, our possible next step. Are these not angels? We constantly receive messages from within that seem to emerge out of nowhere yet carry intimate and life-altering awareness.

Our instincts send us dreams, those mighty visitors who mirror back for us some needed clue for our journey. Are these not angels? Our imagination and rational capacities are surely emissaries of the divine in us. Our emerging diagnosis of depression as a wake up call from the body, alerting us that something else needs to be happening than what is — Is this not an angel sent from within to assist us in changing course when we’ve lost our way?

James Hillman goes so far as to say the very words we speak are angels, “independent carriers of soul between people, personal presences which have whole mythologies, with their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects.” Is this not the Christmas message, that God so loves us, there can be no stopping until God becomes flesh of our flesh? A light in our darkness. No, part of our darkness! If God is to be part, depression and our daily struggles and hardships of any kind are only God being with us from another perspective.

As candlelight brought into the darkened church once stirred my soul, I sense now the light of conscious awareness brought into my body by these carnal angels as a wonderful Christmas story. The light of awareness, the light of spirit entering my body — Is this not the story we tell of God’s spirit entering the Virgin’s body? Angels, light, messages of God’s coming, stories of  wonder and new beginnings, God and man eternally embodied  — Christmas, yes.

We come together during the Advent season to tell the stories, to tell our stories of a God who intervenes and embodies and walks our walk. Let us not forget, then, in the hustle and bustle of collecting Christmas, that God chose to be so close that our very bodies, with everything that means for us, herald to each we meet, “Look, God is here.”  Even in our darkest behaviors, in our blackest doubts, in all our “guarding, blaspheming, creating and annihilating” moments, our God is here, breathing, longing, laughing, waiting in us. 

“Emanuel, Emanuel, who are we that you should love us so well?”

CARVING OUT VIRGINAL SPACE

I’m always reminded, with each return of December’s dance, of that seasonal story of stable births and virginal responses. Just because I’m all grown up and have made room in my life for other stories, that doesn’t mean the old story can’t hold its own.

It’s a yearly reminder, like seasonal changes and income taxes: I’m not honoring my God-energy if I’m not making room in myself. Carving out space within, for God, however we define God — that eternal source and spark of life that yearns for us to be the person we were born to be – is central to the Christmas story.

I’ve recently had a month in which I overextended myself – accomplishing impossible multiple goals in a less-than-adequate time frame combined with two weeks of jury duty that threw my work schedule into chaos; plus pre-arranged commitments for which I could only show up.

I wasn’t anywhere I was, because I wasn’t there, my essence, my soul. I relied on will energy rather than soul energy. I willed myself through the month rather than allow the energy springing from my essence, my passion and vitality – my soul energy – to enliven and carry me. Will energy only depletes the body and ravages the soul. Soul energy replenishes and enlarges.

The consequence of that benevolent neglect was that I was not emotionally present when my daughter and her family came to stay the weekend with me. I tried so hard to be there, but I was exhausted and preoccupied. We both experienced the weekend as a loss of connection.

That young Jewish girl we’ve come to know as Mary is best remembered for her response to God when he suggested he take up residence in her. Without knowing what it would mean for her life, what it would demand of her, without any control of the outcome, Mary is known down the ages for having said, “Let it happen to me.” Or as the Beetles put it, “Let it be.”

It’s no small coincidence that God took up residence in Mary’s body, not her will. It is in our body that we experience our God-energy. Whether Mary was a physical virgin or not, I believe God was in love with her virginal response to life. She had carved away all that distracted her from her ability to fully respond to wherever or whatever her God-energy called forth.

What has all this to do with my recent hellish month? I was so busy willing myself through all the deadlines and demands, I failed to allow the rejuvenating power of that faithful God-energy within to carry and minister to me; to complete, with me, those tasks I had no energy to complete. My body cried out, yet I ignored, bullied, force-fed her until she was totally exhausted.

How would it have been different had I relied instead on soul energy? It would have meant that I was so balanced, within and without, nothing from the outside world could have violated my virginal essence.

It would have meant that, as demands and pressures mounted, I would allow that eternal breathing within me to flow and mingle with my own conscious breathing. I would hear the ocean within me. On my morning walks, I would allow the moon as she played hide and seek with me above the trees to soothe my exhausted spirit. I would feel the stroking of her moonbeams.

What Mary did – what we all must do – is to meet whatever, or Whoever, greets us with an energy and a grounding larger than our own small capacity to will our way through it. Our will isolates us. Our body, with her capacity to feel and to experience, connects us. We connect to our soul energy through our body, and with it, to all of life.

Luckily, life is not like those fairy tales in which the Golden Goddess rings once, then forces the sleeping hero to forever seek a second chance. Life offers second chances moment by moment.