In the town where I grew up in, there’s a church that was built around the early 1400’s. It’s not a very spectacular building, other than the fact that it’s held up to over 600 years of rain, hail, sleet, snow and, because it’s in England, occasionally sunlight.
That it still stands is a testament to the skills of its builders, and for me, there’s something very comforting about a building that old, that resilient, that timeless.
I feel like it connects us through time with those who have gone before.
But what’s even more impressive is going inside, and just sitting quietly. The older I get, the more I find silence to be inspiring; like I can hear the passing of time, and the accumulated knowledge of the human race trying to whisper to me its secrets.
Sitting in a building that old, especially one that was constructed for the very purpose of facilitating connection with a sense of something greater than ourselves, gives a sense of perspective not just of time, but also of our lives and the living out of our days.
In a building such as this, time itself seems an echo.
Sitting in that place, with stone, wood and glass that is so much older than I am, it’s easy to find myself drifting through reflection and emotion. Almost like I could connect with the dreams, desires, wishes, and struggles of the people who have sat in that place before me.
Some, many years ago, may have struggled to keep warm, while some less than a century ago would have struggled to avoid the bombs falling from the sky.
Somehow, the echoes of their problems live on in our lives, just with a different flavor of sadness, a different echo of madness.
Yet I think their dreams are also echoed in all of us, through both our biology and our societies. And, if there is such a thing, maybe somehow in our souls. At our core, the desires of most of us are pretty much the same.
We wish to love and feel loved, we wish for safety and the feeling of security, and we wish to feel a part of something that gives us a sense of meaning to the passing of our days.
I think sometimes we wish to feel ourselves as a part of the echo of humanity.
I had the chance recently to feel some of that echo myself, as my wife, my oldest son and myself went to watch a movie together. It was the sequel to a movie released almost 40 years ago; a movie that was for my wife and I an iconic capture of our adolescence, and the aspirations, hopes and feelings of a certain moment in time.
And watching my son love the sequel in the same way that we loved the original, I realized that my son was experiencing his own echo of the lives that we had lived, and the life that we had given to him.
Which made me wonder about all the echoes we have left with him in his soul, and to reflect on the echoes left in us from our parents, and the world in which we came to be. The more I ponder and reflect, the greater becomes my understanding that none of us are a singular sound outside of the orchestral grandeur that is the lasting note of humanity, both beautiful and discordant, both majestic and full of misery.
Every single one of us is in some way a reflection and an echo of all that has gone before, and the lives and years that will go on after us will reflect in some way that which we choose to do and be today.
May the echo of humanity be one of kindness and love, and may you feel of that daily and always.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings