Being Prepared

be prepared

You never know what you’re being prepared for. I don’t remember where I first heard or learned this, but I’ve repeated it to myself and others many times because it helps me take a long view of the moment’s difficulties or upsets or reversals or opportunities.

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart

until, in our own despair, against our will,

comes wisdom through the awful grace of God

Aeschylus writes. That “awful grace,” like Yeats’ “terrible beauty” is a stirring paradox: grace will not be reduced to leniency. And wisdom cannot be bought or won or acquired by effort, but is the fruit of what we undergo. How we endure. In our moments of deepest awareness we encounter a mighty and mysterious divinity who “shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will” and must choose either to rebel against or submit to the hewing and honing that prepares us to be wise elders and faithful servants.

In spite of ourselves, life equips us for what we can’t foresee it and sometimes dread. The value of autobiography and memoir lies largely in the way the backward glance makes this process visible. “This is what the past is for!” Corrie ten Boom writes. “Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.” We see it later. Most of us, I imagine, have had occasion to recognize that had one difficult thing not happened, another, which has made all the difference, would not have happened either. “Sorrow prepares us for joy,” Rumi writes, and though, out of context, such a claim can sound glib, it is worth pondering, and witnessing in the lives of those who have, as one older woman simply put it, “been through things.” Though suffering doesn’t necessarily make people wise, it seems that wisdom rarely, if ever, comes without some suffering.

“Suffer” once had a wider meaning than we generally assign it now, which was “to allow.” We receive only when we allow. We learn only when we receive. And only our learning prepares us to be, as Jesus advised, “Wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” ready for whatever is given, open to guidance as it comes. Only the well prepared can improvise effectively; actors, musicians, stand-up comics, teachers and preachers learn this. And improvisation always involves paradox: gather all you have learned and let go. Face down Goliath with only the five smooth stones that lie at your feet. Set off with nothing but sandals and staff. Take the ring and begin he journey, though you do not know the way. Consider the lilies and leave tomorrow in God’s hands. It’s one of Jesus’ more difficult teachings—especially the “considering” part.

“Ripeness is all,” Edgar says to his father, who wishes to die before his time. Glocester is prepared to die, but not, as he needs to be, prepared to keep living for a while, until his time comes. There’s the rub. We may prepare ourselves for the grand exit, or for heroic action or achievement, but be surprised when what is required of us is only the daily, sometimes tedious, fidelity of “human merely being.” The “ripening” is an interior process, subtle as cells dividing and proteins furling and hormones ferrying their quiet messages to the far ports of the body that goes its way, unaware. We make our choices, consult and plan and prepare, and all the while we are, thank God, being prepared. And a place is being prepared for us, and a feast.