Redeeming the time

Trusting in the "slow work" through the bittersweet times of life.

This time of year — late March / early April — has become kind of bittersweet for me over the past decade.

My former friend’s birthday and mine are 12 days apart, hers in March and mine in April. We always used to make a point of celebrating together sometime between the two dates; we’d plan lunch or breakfast out and exchange presents and heartfelt cards. I remember once we were at a downtown café and when we took out our gifts for each other, a very pleasant woman at a nearby table commented on them and wished us happy birthdays. It was the actress Jackie Burroughs!

We had our final birthday breakfast date not long before the conflict that broke us apart. We met at one of our favourite restaurants (which, somewhat symbolically, no longer exists). I was relieved to have gotten over a nasty bout of strep throat, and spring had well and truly arrived at last; all seemed right with the world and, I thought, with our friendship. We had such a lovely time together, I would never have imagined the storm to come.

Photo by Meg Jenson on Unsplash

Just a few weeks later, after I'd raised a sensitive subject with her, she was telling me I “had no grace” and that I was unsafe and unaccepting. The accusations flew so thick and fast I had no time to duck and avoid them. Our friendship fractured, and despite several ill-fated (even ill-advised) attempts to work things out, it would never be restored. Warmth and intimacy were replaced by distance and the silent treatment. Birthday cards became perfunctory, dropped off in mailboxes rather than exchanged over a celebratory meal. Then they dwindled to impersonal emails … then nothing. Those special days now passed in silence.

Then, about 10 years afterward, she would publish a memoir in which she would claim we had resolved everything in a single conversation — that when she realized how “weighed down” I was by hearing about her painful past, she apologized for “leaning too heavily” on me and instantly the rift was healed.

But while the conversation did happen, it was not about those things (nor was our conflict). And it did not solve everything. We have not had even a single followup conversation as friends, or about our friendship, since then. Unfortunately what she wrote didn’t reflect reality.

It’s hard enough when your lives diverge; it’s even harder when your stories do. Up until that point I’d thought we had a similar understanding of our situation — that we were at least moving in the same direction, like trains on two separate but still parallel tracks. But now it seemed more like we were that double train that used to leave Kingston for Montreal and Ottawa: at a certain point the two trains decoupled and went off in entirely different directions. As we seemed to have done.

I guess it’s only human for us to tell the stories we need to tell to make sense of our lives. She needed a happy ending for us, so she wrote one. I would have liked one too, so I understand — or at least I’ve tried to.

But although I’m slowly coming to terms with that aspect, the time of year itself still feels poignant. I’ve had some lovely birthdays in the past few years, and made some beautiful memories with other friends and with my family. But there are still times when I feel it, like a cloud moving across the sunny sky and casting a shadow.

Anyone who’s experienced any kind of loss knows what I'm talking about — the way joyful times and experiences can be shadowed by that sense of something missing, that absence of what used to be.

There’s a Bible verse, Ephesians 5:16, that refers to “redeeming the time.” That’s the King James Version wording; it might be more accurately rendered as “making the most of the time.” But I like “redeeming.” I like the idea of time being redeemed, whether that’s all of time or just a span of 12 spring days.

I believe those good memories I talked about making with other people are part of that redeeming process. And maybe the good memories of my times with my friend — of which there were many — will play a part too. One day I may suddenly realize the sweet has overcome the bitter, without my even being aware it was happening. But I can’t force that. Rushing to a conclusion that’s hopeful but not completely truthful only makes things worse, as I’ve found.

I think we just have to let ourselves feel whatever we need to feel during these times, and not try to manufacture any particular experience or outcome. Maybe we will find ourselves gradually becoming more at ease with ambiguity and unanswered questions, though I admit none of that comes naturally to me.

As these words from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — with which I’ll end — so beautifully remind us, the redeeming of time is a slow work.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually — let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Photo by Gena Okami on Unsplash