Life is Surreal in 2020

Me and my goddaughter at the beach in Thailand

I have never had a Christmas like I had in 2019.  It might just be pointing to 2020.  So what happened?

The week before Christmas, I was prepared for the visit of my goddaughter whom I had not seen since she was a baby.  That tells me how long I have been here in my Bangkok. I was happily awaiting the coming of an intelligent, smart and lively 19 year old, young woman.  After so long, I faced her coming with both a sense of excitement and trepidation.  It was all surreal, like the plot for a movie. 

Well, the movie plot got even better when, two days before her arrival, I got an emergency call that one of my western male neighbours had had a traumatic collapse and been taken to hospital unconscious. The task of helping my friend in his moment of dire need then seemed to naturally fall upon my shoulders. .  The immediate and important task was to find and contact family whom he had left behind many years ago for a life given over to addiction in Bangkok. The task was mine as no one else would do it and I knew no matter what, he was a likeable guy who deserved to be treated with dignity and shown a fair go.  This is what any decent human being would do, let alone being the work of a priest.  This brought me into dealing literally with life and death issues for my friend. 

So unfolded my pre-Christmas human drama which spoke of the paradoxes of life.  I was caught between hosting the young, lively and engaging goddaughter and my neighbour in a coma in ICU at hospital who needed someone to act for him.  The discrepancy between the two experiences happening in parallel was just mind boggling.

The goddaughter is young and vibrant, full of life and hope.  My neighbour was showing no life.  What was his future?  Where was the hope?  One had a life full of friends, while the other was alone and had no one close to him to care for him.

Is this life?  Yes, it is.  The good, the bad and the ugly - they all make up life.  It is all a part of who we are.  In both stories of my human drama, there was to be a resolution but each was very different.  One was a new found friendship leading to a fuller flourishing into the future.  The other was about my neighbour dealing with loss even in an unconscious state and come to an end of what was a life lost through missed opportunities and bad choices.  One spoke of transforming life through friendship and striving.  The other spoke of the transformation we all meet through loss in life. 

This is truly Christmas which is not about surfacy, temporary happiness but joy that comes with true love that sees us through to the highest heights and the lowest depths in life.

Ho! Ho! Ho!  Let 2020 roll on. 

2020 is looking rather surreal.