Urgencies

Read this morning the tragic story of the suicide of the ER doctor, overwhelmed by our Covid catastrophe. Heart-wrenching. 

And I thought particularly of her interactions with her beloved sister who recounted for the journalist the conversations she’d had with her sibling as the situation developed into crisis and devolved to eventual tragedy.

Those conversations, whatever else, were surely encounters. I’ve been asserting  encounters are enduring, and still think so, but have to ask myself what difference that fact could have made to the worried sister watching the one she cared so deeply for descend the slope to darkness and death. (Even to write this is hard. Oh, in the face of all you who labor so hard and suffer so much, I can only bow my head.) 

Going back…That’s the problem with encounters: they occur and then become past, irrelevant to the stream of urgencies we are immersed in all the time. The mundane world is the realm of urgencies of all kinds–life or death, in time or late, good enough or just won’t do–whereas the transcendent world, where encounters live out their fresh futures forever, has no cutoffs, no deadlines, no thresholds, none of the typical sources of pressure that we squeeze and chivvy us continually. Time in the transcendent is not rushed or regretful but in the mundane relentless.

We can’t not live in the world of urgencies. They are inherent in the circumstances and operations of our mundane existence. There’s nothing invalid or to be despised about that. Hurrah for mundanity. Engrossing as they are, all urgencies come eventually to an end and are succeeded by new ones, like us. 

We interleave our encounters, our forays into the transcendent, with our urgencies. Or, to use another metaphor, our encounters are like canals that run parallel to but beyond the wild river of urgency that we are swept down willy-nilly every day. The terrible outcome of the story of the ER doctor doesn’t invalidate the deeply concerned conversations, the encounters, she had with her sister but it just makes them seem irrelevant or insufficient, which in one sense they were. 

Which brings us to reflecting, that third phase of encountering, after recognizing others, and risking encounters. Not while but afterwards, in reflection, we encounter the encounter itself.

An encounter is an occasion, but can an occasion be an other which one can encounter? I think the answer is yes. First, it is concrete and in context. As something enduring, it is ever more itself; it has a dignity; and it is vulnerable to betrayal, rejection, disappointment. More obviously, it can resist or insist, as memories often do.  

Second, an encounter has a livingness, that is, a readiness to recognize others, not just objects, and othernesses, not just variations, as well as an openness to others and othernesses.

So when we reflect, we freshly encounter the original encounter, and we consider things like:

How amazed we are that the encounter occurred at all; how curious we are about what kind of an occasion it was (for instance, how it happened within and was relevant to the flow of urgencies, and yet also transcendent); and how moved we are by it in such intimate ways. In just these ways a final phone call can resonate in our lives in different ways all our life. So encounters make new encounters.

In reflection also, we can think about our experiences encountering and about ourselves as encounterers, that is, those who are not just able and willing to risk encounters, but also to reflect on them, and to recognize their transcendent presence progressing steadily alongside our immanent torrent of urgencies. 

May this peace be with all of us in this anguished time.