“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of invisible and visible winged seeds, so the stream of time brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them.” –Thomas Merton
I would be interested to hear your thoughts and feelings about this quote.
After my last post, I thought I would pick an excerpt from my book to share:
When I think that grace leads to sin, I have been deluded into a common misunderstanding that confuses grace for tolerance or permissiveness. Such laxity is the opposite of grace, because grace is the embodiment of care and concern. If a wife doesn’t care when her husband comes home, or if he comes home, doesn’t give a rip if he gets drunk or beats the kids, we should not call her gracious, but indifferent, cold, uncaring. If her husband says, “Mind if I leave for a month with my secretary?” and his wife answers, “Whatever,” then sin is certainly being encouraged, but not by grace. That woman is the epitome of ungrace. “Whatever” is freedom offered from a heart empty of love. “Sure, go anywhere. Go to hell for all I care.”
Freedom which is the result of an uncaring relationship loses all its glory, its joy and celebration, its power, its benefit. Such freedom is a terrible burden–a freedom from the concern of anyone but myself, absolutely alone in the universe. Relationship demands some restriction of freedom. It is impossible without this, for if I alone am the single consideration in every choice I make, relationship ceases to exist. Then others simply become my environment. Grace is not laxity, but love.
I’m not very good at grace, either receiving it or giving it. My wife and I took the last name “Grace,” because we wanted it to be the foundation of our personal lives and relationships–but it will always be more of a goal than a descriptor. Some months back, I read some excerpts from my self-published book “Overwhelmed by Grace” that lay untouched for several years. I authored it while restructuring my whole worldview, which had been dashed to bits by a tidalwave of truth. Grace was still fairly theoretical and cognitive for me at that time… it had not sifted down into my way of being and perceiving and sharing. In retrospect, my book on grace seems to be more stark and challenging than gracious in presentation, revealing the battle I was waging inside myself. I have grown into grace so much more since then, and a great deal of the credit goes to my wife, Kimberly, but grace still struggles to gain ascendance in my soul. It is such a very long and arduous journey, and progress seems so slow. I lose patience and want to force myself to grow faster, but grace has its own pace and rhythm and cannot be hurried without tainting its nature. Patience with myself (and with God) is one of the toughest lessons of grace to embrace, especially in the face of others’ impatience. In spite of its reputation, grace has not come easy for me–not easy, but richly rewarding. So I am deeply grateful for every bit that has found its way into my life.
“Our suffering itself may become a form of prayer, if we can learn to let submission and love, even praise, ascend to God through it. It is a wonderful and awesome thing when in the grip of severe pain or sorrow to look up into the face of God and say: “I bring You this–now; accept it for the sake of the Lord Jesus.” It may not be the sacrifice we would choose to bring, but if pain is what God has given us, and pain is all we have, we may offer it up to Him as a sacrifice of praise and He will both accept it and hallow it. Such an offering may be one of the purest forms of worship known to the spirit of man.” Margaret Clarkson
For the last few days I have been reading a book that is overbearingly optimistic. There is very little room in the author’s world for emotions that don’t feel good: sadness is something to be cured, not indulged. When I feel that some part of my life is unwelcome to another, I feel devalued, invalidated. I don’t feel safe around someone who needs me to disguise my true feelings to make him or her comfortable.
I realize, of course, that the same can be said for a melancholic who tries to suppress the cheerful, but the American culture, including the church, weighs in heavily on the side of optimism. Although some forms of Christianity through history have more quickly associated spirituality with melancholy, this is not the American way.
It seems to me a dangerous assumption to equate faith with pleasant feelings, leaving unpleasant feelings to be associated with doubt. I have discovered in my own life that it takes a great deal of faith to allow myself to fully experience, acknowledge, and even welcome my own “negative” feelings and that those experiences often bring about greater growth than the pleasant ones.
So why do I read this oppressively optimistic book? Because I need the encouragement of sunny thoughts… as long as I can receive them in the amount and with the emphasis that builds up my soul. If optimism is excessive (for me), far from helping, it depresses me more. I feel isolated, I feel the other person cannot understand or appreciate my experience. However, if I value and validate my own experience of melancholy first, I can then welcome cheerful words to encourage me rather than shame me. It is confusing for the optimist to hear, but I find more comfort when folks accept my melancholy than when they try to cheer me up. I think we all have a long way to grow in learning to embrace our differences.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” Rainer Maria Rilke
From first grade everyone knows the goal is to find answers, and failing to find the right answer is the great failure. Far more anguish comes from this sense of unsatisfied obligation than from not knowing. Rilke’s quotation suggests that if I cannot find the answers, it is not my fault, that too earnestly looking for the answer may be irresponsible. This perspective might give me relief if I could live in the faith that answers are gifts rather than the reward of sweat and tears, that questions are themselves answers in their own right and not just blanks that need filling in.
But without answers, how does one know how to live, make decisions, respond to the world on a daily basis? Are today’s choices simply made at random, haphazardly, without basis? That is to say, if I get no answers, am I to assume that all (reasonable) paths are equal, that each will work out comparably well? In particular, what job do I try to land when my future is so open-ended? How much effort do I put into each direction? Or do I just sit at home till I get an answer? What does it mean to “live the question”?
Perhaps the questions drive me back to listening more carefully to my own heart… but then am I not looking for answers again, just answers for different questions? Confusion. Confusion is a terrible place to live. Why is it so hard for me there? Life feels much safer if I have some control over it, but I cannot steer if I am blind. One might appeal to the thrill of adventure into the unknown, but rollercoasters are only exciting as long as they are firmly set on rails. The one who has been in a disastrous wreck, as I was in Calcutta, can feel only terror in uncertainty. Questions are incomparably harder to live than answers… any answers.
I have been listening to country videos this morning. If I skip past the shallow, trashy and stupid ones (common to every music genre), they make me nostalgic for a traditional family past, a past that never happened. I borrow memories from “The Waltons” and Hallmark movies, add snippets of wishful thinking, and, cutting around the fights and fears and tensions, stitch together just the happy bits of Christmas and Thanksgiving and vacations. My recollections are good ones, just not accurate ones. Memory has a wonderful facility for reconstructing the past to feel good… even things that crushed me as a boy seem somehow softened, almost endearing now.
Those sunny memories sing hope to my troubled heart and stir up a longing to recreate them in my life–a time (as I remember) when relationships were simple and straightforward, even quarrels made us bond more closely, and everyone in the family wanted to be together, a place where I could be myself and I was accepted for who I am and pretenses were dropped. But as I discovered, hopes built on such imaginary figments are doomed to repeated and increasingly painful disappointments.
Reality battered my soul for ten years before it finally broke through and crushed those false hopes, and now there is no going back, no denying what I now see, no ignoring the fears I once covered over so well… there is only going forward… into pain and fear and confusion and tears. For the last decade my only hope has been to push through the suffering into something better on the other side, but this harsh place has been an inescapable quagmire. I have grown a great deal, but it has brought no significant relief, peace, or joy… only continued breaking. I have done the best I can in every situation, at each fork taken the way that seemed right, but I am no closer to finding my way out of this misery.
Unfortunately, few folks are comfortable enough with my experience of life to allow me to be as I am and be okay with it. They want to help me, fix me, advise and counsel me because they care about me, but also because my pain is uncomfortable to them–it does not fit well with their theology, worldview, or experience. It doesn’t fit well with my theology either, but I cannot lie about my experience in order to validate my theology. I do not know how this story ends. It is what it is today.
So we are sitting Saturday afternoon in our living room and see an ambulance go by (our street is three blocks long). I went outside and saw the EMT vehicle and two cop cars two doors down. The neighbor told me that the woman sitting on his door step had knocked on his door covered with blood and asked to be driven home. She had apparently walked through the woods after stabbing a man who pulled a gun on her in a house one street over. My guess is that she came from the trailer park that is off the main road one street over. This is so bizarre after the woman who was murdered 7 houses down! We have such a quiet middle class street!
(Have someone appointed to touch each appropriate area as different people read the blessing for that area)
FOREHEAD: May you have keen insights and think clearly. May your thoughts be kind and wise.
EARS : May you hear the affirmations of friends and family, and listen to the Voice of God telling you that you are loved.
EYES: May you see God’s grace in your life, and may you have the inner vision to see more clearly the path that is yours.
MOUTH: May you speak with love, be true to who you are, and make your needs known.
NOSE: As you take in air and let out air, may you be reminded of the cycle of life with its dying and rising, its emptying and filling. May your life come to peace with each phase.
HANDS: May you use your hands to touch all of life with reverence and gratitude, and may you receive the gentle touch of those who reach out to you.
SKIN: May you learn to protect your body’s natural boundaries, treat it well, and accept it’s limitations with grace.
HEART: May you develop awareness of what stirs deep within you, and remain open to love and grace that is offered to you.
FEET: As you travel through the many ups and downs of life, may all the places your feet take you lead you to greater transformation and inner freedom.
ALL: May the shelter of God embrace you.
May the dance of God play in you.
May the peace of God be with you. Amen.
Last night L’Arche Blue Ridge Mountains gave me a going away party. I have been working on and off for them the last month to help get things up to a good operating level for the new fellow taking charge. They are participating in lent with soup and bread on Tuesday nights, so it was a simple meal. They gave me a memory album of photos of L’Arche and prayed the L’Arche farewell blessing over me (which is really beautiful… I will have to get a copy and share it here). Another L’Arche assistant who has been there only a few months suddenly decided last week to quit, so they lumped his goodbye in with mine. I was not asked about this, and no one even told me this was going to happen, so when I saw what was happening, I felt resentful, expecting that my special time to connect nostalgically with my friends was being usurped. But it worked out well in the end. I may offer my services temporarily as an assistant (a direct care giver) since they are currently short-staffed. The director suggested that if the job for which I am applying does not work out, he might offer me a position as development director, which would not be my dream job, but would keep food on the table.
Janathan Grace Reflections 