A Saturday with Morrie

I’ve given up fighting the urge to diarise. Yesterday afternoon I wept for a good hour and then some – as long as it takes to watch 'Tuesdays with Morrie'. If you haven’t seen this movie then you should (yes, am going to force my own movie opinions on the world, just this once). The book, of course, is better, but it is based on the true story of a sociology professor who gets Lou-Gehrig's disease (ALS) and decides to make his dying his last great lesson. A former sociology student goes to visit him – on Tuesdays - where he learns the ‘meaning of life’. The catch phrase of the dying professor becomes "we must love each other or die", from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘1 September, 1939’ and among his lessons he mentions such things as the regret of pride, vanity and hardness of heart, the importance of family ... It’s quite simple really, but it’s the sort of movie that makes me want to change my life, to centre it more around people and relationships, to spend more time with my grandparents ... to listen to that "bird on my shoulder" ...

But as I sat there longing for this and that to be different I also began to wonder if that was a particularly helpful response ... Sure, I could certainly change some things for the better, but we have to consider, in our current circumstances, the sovereignty of God as it works out in our lives also.

I remembered reading, in Larry Crabb’s book 'God of my Father', this: "Everyone’s life is a story whose point is discovered only when that story is lifted up into the larger story of God ... the plot of our larger story, which gives meaning to all our lesser tales, is made known only in the book God wrote. Life never reveals its meaning by itself ...". And that, very sadly, for all the good things Morrie learnt by an honest look around him, is the meaning that as far as we can know from his book Morrie missed.