The Examined Life
July 31, 2025
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Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Yes, there are answers – right within ourselves.
When the rooster who lives in my brain wakes me each morning at 3:30 or 4:00 (which is all the sleep old men need), I like to have a couple of cups of coffee while I read something uplifting.
Three readings last week told me the same truth in different words.
It began with Thomas Merton’s Journal entry of July 31, 1961. On that day, the monk-mystic-poet-author came to the realization that truth is found in the reality of his own life, “as it is given to me . . . by complete consent and acceptance.”
In other words, I am what I am, and there’s no changing that despite my most fervent yearning otherwise.
Second was this quote from Saint Gianna Molla: “The secret of happiness is to live moment by moment and to thank God for all that he sends us day after day.”
In other words, it’s all good, because God does not impose evil on us. And I can attest to this. In the autumn of my life, I can look back and witness how the most outrageous strokes of bad luck have all turned out for the best. All of them.
I had never heard of Saint Gianna, but a turn through Wiki educated me. She was a pediatrician in Italy who, during her fourth pregnancy in 1961, developed a fibroma on her uterus. The options were an abortion, a hysterectomy, or the removal of the fibroma alone.
She opted for the removal of the fibroma, reasoning that her child's life was more important than her own. She successfully delivered a daughter by Caesarean section, but died of septic peritonitis a week later. The daughter became a doctor of geriatrics.
Finally, there was a chapter from Mark Nepo’s blockbuster, The Book of Awakening.
Nepo draws a parallel between Thích Nhất Hạnh’s enlightenment comes when the wave realizes it is water, and the enlightenment that can be ours the moment we realize we’re made of – love.
Think about it. I, for one, entered existence because of the passionate love of two young people.
What does it do to our fear of living when we realize we’re made not only by love, but also for love?
Writes Nepo: “Grace comes to the heart when it realizes what it is made of and what it has risen from.”
When Moses asked God’s name, barefoot before the burning bush as Chagall portrays him, above, he was told: “I am who am.”
Spiritual writers aren’t alone in probing the nature of being. Some of the unlikeliest people are amateur ontologists.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek
franchise, once wrote a script titled “The God Thing.” As a result, he was interviewed about his religious beliefs. He said:
“I believe I am God; certainly you are; I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can
be in the first place.”
In a way, we are the same stuff as God. Existence. Ani mi shani in Hebrew. Esse in Latin. Being.
This is the truth behind all our pseudo-philosophical flailing about “Be yourself” . . . “Be all you can be” . . . “Too big for your britches.”
This is the truth revealing the thinness of the skin separating us from the other members of the human herd.
This is the truth driving the Socratic dictum: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
In the dark of my library before dawn last week, many voices were speaking to me as one. I am what I am. Made simply to be and to love, for I rose from love.
Yes, I have memories and I have dreams, but there is no past, no future. Eternity is in the present. Waiting for me to unclench my fist.