December 31, 2022 /

Noah’s Ark

Photo by Lucas Dial on Unsplash

The biblical story of Noah’s Ark and the great global Flood recounted in Genesis 6-8, seems to find a reflection in the current clime of the flood of pestilence which has swept over us all.  COVID and its mutated variants have swirled around the globe for a second year with deadly impact, causing great suffering and taking countless lives in wave after engulfing wave.   Never have I been so personally confronted with my own mortality, nor so continually challenged to navigate unscathed through troubled and uncertain times.

If there is anything that the Year of 2022 has taught me, it is that life, or our existence, is fundamentally impermanent and that we need to create for ourselves our own metaphorical ‘ark’.  By this I suggest a body of spiritual truths and/or a spiritual doctrine to help us ride the waves of misrepresentation, false information, negativity and fantastical theories.  Reality has a spiritual foundation and COVID, in holding a mirror to our mortality, has highlighted how important it is to build something spiritually permanent for ourselves which will transcend this flood.

What is real?  What is true?  What body of doctrine can help us understand why we were born and what happens to us on the other side of death?

Discovering the answers to those questions is the journey the seeker after truth takes.  It requires courage, perseverance, unwavering effort, and a sense of discontentment.  Sometimes one finds others along the way, but my experience has been that the journey is for the most part a solitary one.  I’ve always found that it is in solitude that I can hear what I’m meant to hear, that I can see what I’m meant to see, and that gently, ever so gently, I find my way.

Michele T Knight Written by:

Dr Michele Knight is a Social Worker, Social Scientist, researcher and independent scholar. Her interest and research in the end-of-life has its origin in the lived experiences of her own bereavements, her near-death and shared-death events, the returning deceased and attitudinal responses to those experiences. Since 2006, she has been extensively involved in community development, support and advocacy in both a professional and community services/voluntary capacity in the areas of bereavement and grief, hospital pastoral care, and academic lecturing/tutoring. Her PhD, Ways of Being: The alchemy of bereavement and communique, explores the lived experience of bereavement, grief, spirituality and unsought encounters with the returning deceased.

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