Be a Passer By

I was reading today C.S. Thompson's Book "Prayers for Nothing" and read a passage that I thought to be a very beautiful way of relating to life. It reminded me of saying 42 from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said "Be a Passerby".

This short saying can be quite puzzling and I continue to reflect on it often. At first one may think it's saying something like "Be apathetic". But a passerby is simply one who moves on unattached to each place. He is not necessarily unavailable to the places he visits, but he moves on like a river that may feed the crops or flood a valley and yet still continue on it's way back to it's source.

Gnostics are often accused of being world denying and perhaps many were and are. 'World denying' in this sense is synonymous with 'life denying'. But many of the Gnostics I know today are not this way at all and I believe Thompson's views reflect a more life embracing view while also recognizing the importance of unmasking the fraudulent and unjust.

Here is the excerpt, both the poem and commentary:

I knelt here once and asked with outstretched hands, For things that don’t mean anything at all. So I will kneel and ask for nothing now. The things we want are worthless, and the worldDenies them to us to expose the fraud. I’ll praise the mercy of this savage God, Who forced me to approach Him as I am-A man with open eyes and empty hands.

No matter what we create it won’t last forever. The so-called immortality of great art is just a slightly longer moment in a vast span of time, which will disappear as if it never existed just as we do. But beauty is its own end; it requires no prop. No one asks the Cathedral of Chartres if it ought to have been built; its magnificence is its justification. We shouldn't cultivate the spirit merely in order to chase the chimera of happiness, and we shouldn't be so naive as to think that we can be free of pain. We should cultivate our spirits for no other reason than to make them beautiful, to create in our own selves the harmonious balance of which we’re capable. This beauty includes every aspect of a life well-lived- from struggle and ambition to love and service, treating others with respect and equality while not being afraid to fight for what’s right, accepting the hard facts of a hard world while retaining the capacity for joy and ecstatic awe. If we find happiness along the way, then so be it, and if we find suffering instead then so be it. Either way, we’ll become something more than we were, whatever our talents or lack of them. We’ll be able to say we actually lived. In a world where so many people only pass the time, marking the minutes in Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” until it is time to die, that is reason enough.