What are you human life?!.Saint Colombanus.

       

Saint Colombanus.

          Human life, fragile and marked for death, how many have you deceived, beguiled, and blinded? While in flight, you are nothing; while in sight, you are a shadow; while you rise up, you are but smoke. Every day you depart and every day you return; you depart in returning and you return in depart­ing, different ending, same beginning, different pleasure, the same passing, sweet to the foolish and bitter to the wise. Those who love you do not know you, and those who condemn you really understand you. Thus you are not true but false; you pre­sent yourself as true but prove yourself false. 

          What are you then, human life? You are the wayfaring of mortals and not their liv­ing; your beginning is in sin and in death your end. You would be true if the sin of the first human transgression had not cut you short so that you became unsteady and mortal and marked all who tread your way for death. And so you are the way that leads to life, but not life itself, for you are a true way, but not an open one: brief for some and long for others, broad for some and nar­row for others, joyful for some and full of grief for others, but for each and every one, you hurry on and cannot be called back. A way is what you are, a way, but you are not evident to all. Though many see you, few understand that you are indeed a way.

            You are so cunning and alluring that it is given to few to know you as a way. Thus you are to be questioned and not believed or credited, you are to be traversed and not inhabited: wretched human life. for a road is to be walked on and not lived in, so that they who walk upon it may dwell finally in the land that is their home.

            And so, mortal life, it is the foolish and the lost, spurned by those with sense and avoided by those to be saved, who dwell in you, who love you, and who believe in you. Therefore, human life, you are to be feared and much avoided, for you are so fleeting, shifting, dangerous, brief, and uncertain that you shall be dis­solved like a shadow, a mirage, a cloud, a nothingness, or an emptiness. Thus while you are nothing, mortal life, but a way, a fleeting and empty mirage, or a cloud, uncertain and frail, or a shadow, like a dream, we must journey through you so anxiously, so carefully, so hastily, that all those with understanding should press on, like wayfarers, to their true homeland, untroubled at what has been and concerned as to what is to come. For there is no advantage for us in reaching the height we have attained unless we escape what is still to come; for this life is to be thought of as a way and an ascent.

            We should not seek in the way what shall only be in our homeland, for effort and fatigue are to be found on the journey, while peace and safety are prepared in the land that is our home. We should be careful therefore in case we are compla­cent on the way and fail to reach our true home. Indeed, there are many who are so at ease on this journey that they seem not so much to be wayfarers as to be already at home, and they travel unwillingly rather than freely toward a home that is for them already lost. These people have exhausted their home in the jour­ney, and with a brief life have bought eternal death. Unfortunate creatures, they delight in their disastrous exchange. They have loved the transitory things of others, and neglected their own eternal possessions. And so, however wonderful they may be, however enticing and beautiful, we should avoid the earthly goods of others so that we do not lose our own inheritance. Let us be found faithful in the property of others so that we may be made inheritors in those things that are truly ours, by the gift of our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns from age to age. Amen.

       Reference:

     Celtic Spirituality. Paulist press. 1999.