This is the kind of eulogy I would wish for myself–not to be remembered for my intelligence or talents or accomplishments, but for a sweet spirit. I think it will take another couple decades of fermenting to become what I wish to be. Here is Daniel Radcliffe’s (Harry Potter) remembrance of Alan Rickman, the late actor:
Alan Rickman is undoubtedly one of the greatest actors I will ever work with. He is also, one of the loyalest and most supportive people I’ve ever met in the film industry. He was so encouraging of me both on set and in the years post-Potter. I’m pretty sure he came and saw everything I ever did on stage both in London and New York. He didn’t have to do that. I know other people who’ve been friends with him for much much longer than I have and they all say “if you call Alan, it doesn’t matter where in the world he is or how busy he is with what he’s doing, he’ll get back to you within a day”.
People create perceptions of actors based on the parts they played so it might surprise some people to learn that contrary to some of the sterner(or downright scary) characters he played, Alan was extremely kind, generous, self-deprecating and funny. And certain things obviously became even funnier when delivered in his unmistakable double-bass.
As an actor he was one of the first of the adults on Potter to treat me like a peer rather than a child. Working with him at such a formative age was incredibly important and I will carry the lessons he taught me for the rest of my life and career. Film sets and theatre stages are all far poorer for the loss of this great actor and man.
I drove home from work this evening with my windshield wipers swishing away the dreariness and plotting how to ease my weary soul: instrumental music, a cinnamon scented candle, a DVD fire on the TV screen, a cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie topped with birthday cake ice cream, while nestling into my sofa to love on my two dogs. So here I sit with Mazie curled up beside me and Mitts stretched out on my lap, lending me their peace.
I have things to do, things easier done in the daylight, but I’ve set them aside as the shadows settle in. Through the back french doors I can just make out the black tree trunks and branches against the dark grey sky on the hill above our home. It is okay. There will always be one more thing to do. My inbox will always be overflowing. Rest is so important to God that it made his top ten list. It is an act of holiness so basic to our well-being that it was the capstone of the world’s creation. Even more than my body, my soul needs to let go, relax, settle in, harbor from the blasts life blows throughout the day.
Come join me. Find your place of calm. Leave the lists and obligations, the insistent tasks and expectations in the hands of the One who can carry it for you and come away to Sabbath for a time until the weariness slowly drains off and washes away. Every person and task in your life is benefited by your self-care. Breathe easy. It is an act of holy obedience.
Be gentle and kind to yourself. Your soul needs it. Be patient with yourself, life is hard enough without your self-criticism. Learn to support yourself, not superficially with cake and new shoes, but at the deepest levels towards your heart’s real needs. Lovingly forgive yourself for your failures and shortcomings as you would those of a dear friend. Be your own best friend. You are in as much need of a true friend as anyone else.
What does your heart need today? It will only be honest with you if you are gentle and kind to it. It is not luxury or indulgence to give first-aid to your bleeding heart-wounds. To ignore them or diminish them would be neglect, so take full measure of your pain and with compassion find a way to give the help your weary, struggling heart needs. With a little courage, ask for assistance from others and accept what is offered freely and without apology, but with real gratitude.
Be kind to yourself today, and gentle. It is the root from which compassion springs up for others. Practice it on yourself first and you will be better at giving it to others.
I have little time before work and only 9 usable fingers, having chunked off the flat of my thumb in my belt sander–a story for another day–so this will be quick and rough, but I have thoughts I want to put down. I watched an old episode of Joan of Arcadia recently and remembered why I liked it–the constant reminder that God does not play by our rules and often leaves us in the dark, even (or rather especially) about our own lives. That is, I hate the experience, but I am grateful for the camaraderie of someone who also feels slapped in the face by life… every day… and cannot find a way to duck the swing.
I have been struggling more deeply with depression for the last few months (which is the reason for my absence here–depression reduces life to survival and little more). It feels awful, so much like an actual physical trauma that I find myself catching my breath with the pain, and more recently grasping my head in my hands as I double over. So I dig through my piles of options for some way to reduce the misery, but while I’m looking, my feelings change. How do you address something which is unpredictable, indiscernible, uncontrollable. I don’t mean I don’t have any influence over my feelings, but it is like driving with a knee around mountain curves… in the fog. So my feelings are constantly in the ditch–it is all I can manage to keep from going over the embankment.
Some days I wake up feeling okay… as long as I just lie there in a drowsy stupor. That makes me think that naps might be a way to avoid my misery… which is true, but not helpful since I can’t live the rest of my life in a coma. It just delays the returning blackness, it doesn’t lighten it. So basically any strategy for avoiding life and its attendant feelings–loving on my dogs, watching TV, reading Facebook–is only a distraction from feeling anything deep or meaningful, it doesn’t resolve or heal or soften those bad feelings that come flooding back the moment I come out of the circus show.
For my religiously minded friends with the easy and certain solution–yes, I keep trying prayer and Bible reading as I am able, I keep looking for a church that doesn’t make me feel even worse afterwards. These have not brought any fundamental relief or changed my experience of life. And for my friends who have found some relief in medicine–I’ve tried several iterations, no luck so far.
Honestly it is not my staggering emotions that are the fundamental soul problem so much as the lack of control and confusion. If I believed that my depression were God-ordained and inescapable, it would relieve me of desperately seeking solutions (which puts a great deal of pressure on myself, and temptation to self-blame). I could settle for learning how to manage the life I am given. But since I have small influences on my emotions, it keeps me actively engaged. Were I to conclude that I had no real control and that my emotional experience of life was wholly in the hands of God, I could accept my lack of control, but that would exacerbate my confusion, not only over why this was God’s choice for me, but how I am to respond to it.
Regarding the first, the very values God promotes are undermined by my depression, not simply because of the inherent self-focus needed and the sapping of all motivation, but because of its intense draining of energy: I don’t have the normal resources from which to draw to be generous-minded, hard-working, other-oriented. Patience looks more like resignation, hope seems more like stubbornness. Wisdom seems to be stymied–if I have too little insight for my own life, what do I have to give to others? And to find any joy present in this mess would require a complete re-definition.
Regarding the second, my response to intractable emotions, it is hard enough to find a rhythm for the dance of life when one’s emotions are consistent, even consistently miserable. A strategy, plan, step-by-step approach can be developed when the playing field is stable, but when it constantly changes, it throws off all efforts to establish patterns, learn dynamics, and create a workable approach.
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That was yesterday. I ran out of time before I could post. But the gears started to spin as I wrote. To suppose that patience as resignation or hope as stubbornness is somehow a poorer, weaker form of the real virtue is to undermine the very breadth and variegated beauty of each virtue, to stereotype, slot, and truncate the vast panoply of experience and expression of each facet of goodness. We have often tried to distill attributes into some pure or regnant form, a person that most exemplifies some particular value, say of courage or discipline. So the essence of real love is seen as mother love, as though there is only one kind of love and everyone should emulate it. But what if there are many unique and invaluable forms of love that are missed by this reduction, that look different from mother love but have their own irreplaceable value: what of the simplicity and humility of a child’s love, the equality and intentionality of a friend’s love, the intensity and intertwining of a spouse’s love… and so even those of us under the heavy weight of depression have a unique offering of love, one of deep understanding and empathy and acceptance. Perhaps depression does not inherently limit, sap, or dull our virtues, but instead refines, strengthens, sharpens them with a special coloring. Our virtues have their own beauty and power, unique role and expression, a glory all their own.
“FORGIVENESS is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.
“It may be that the part of us that was struck and hurt can never forgive, and that strangely, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks – after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having being wounded.
“Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it….
“To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seem to hurt us. We re-imagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we re-imagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.”
~ David Whyte
Living with depression changes one’s whole experience of life, making every engagement with the world a hard struggle as though one is tasked with fixing the pedestal fan after the lights are turned off. But supposedly, although difficult, one would expect that with daily practice one might get slowly better at fixing fans in the dark, figure out work-arounds, develop new skills, develop new expectations of how long a given task will take. This never happens with depression. Each day is just as hard as the day before, just as stressful and dark and hopeless of any real change. There is no new normal to which to adjust, so perhaps a better analogy would be someone who has severe arthritis and each twist of the screw-driver shocks the hand with pain, and yet the task cannot be laid aside, there is no hope for pain relief, and it does not seem to be directed at some greater good, as it would if, for instance, all the energy were directed at escaping a sinking ship or creating heaters for the indigent in freezing climates. It is simply a way to make money so as to stay alive to experience more pain the next day–the reward for faithfulness and perseverance is continuing suffering. It is as though someone lost in the middle of the ocean has been treading water for days, swallowing and choking on water, face burned by the sun and throat burned by dehydration, and with no hope of rescue. I send out my sympathy for those of you struggling one more day in this dark place.
Clothes are like mud flaps to me: functional, not decorative. Each morning, without thought, I pull out the slacks that happen to be closest to hand and grab a shirt that doesn’t clash. I wear stuff till it gets holes and then I throw it out, buying more from the frumpy racks of pants and polos at the local Goodwill for $3 a piece. Everything in my closet and drawers is relatively meaningless and disposable except a pair of purple swim trunks. The color is garish and the pockets are ridiculous–not made of mesh, but solid cloth, scooping air as I dive and ballooning up around my waist like two neon jellyfish. But the trunks are irreplaceable, bought as a gift for me ten years ago on a Florida vacation by a dear friend who was my last hope in the world. He offered not only true friendship, but life purpose in an organization that mirrored my own core values of the shared grace of God embracing our mutual brokenness. And then he died suddenly of a heart attack. I miss him.
The organization wandered away from his vision and I found no one else in town with those core values, so it was quite literally my last hope. For a decade I have been treading water, without any speck on the horizon of meaningful friendship or life focus. Kimberly is with me here, so I am not alone, but we feel adrift in a sea of disconnection and pointlessness. My life before was rich with friends and fruitfulness, so Vince and his organization were not unique in that sense, except in being the last on a journey that has since seemed remarkably barren.
A loud swimsuit speaks to me not only of absence, but of presence, for Vince represents to me all those of good heart still in the world and my hope of finding a few more on the long journey home. When I grow weary in waiting, I remember the past winds on which God blew fellow travelers my way.
Those whose voice once sang love, courage or patience into our hearts sing still to this day, renewing us by their memory. And lest we forget and the echoes of their refrain grow distant, we have been given this special day of the year on the church’s calendar to call us to reach back into this treasure chest of our past and run our thoughts over the contours of their impact, tracing in our minds those deep and abiding impressions that continue to shape our lives for the better.
For weeks I have been trying to fight off the soul-sucking depression that envelopes me. When I can work through the darkness–uncover the reasons and respond with healthy steps–my depression turns into an instrument of growth, but for now my insight is deaf and blind, and so, blocked from any resolution, I try to distract myself with work or entertainment, naps or walks or cuddling with my pooches, just to keep the misery at bay. That fixes nothing, simply postpones the falling night, but at least it makes life manageable for a while longer. Still somewhere underneath, the darkness gathers strength pushing more often and irresistibly passed my efforts to block it. The muddled mutterings of discouragement and hopelessness become louder, more insistent, and having nothing to counter the assault, I find each day a little more of my emotional footing crumbling.
Whispered words of grace are a spiritual balm seeping into my soul, whether they come from liberals or conservatives, Christians or Hindus, teetotalers or alcoholics. It pulls at me from the gritty, raw, tattooed welcome of those sand-blasted into goodwill and entices me with the sweet, gentle, well-worn embrace of those battered into softness. It reaches me from every surprising image of love that pulses through each grace-stippled heart. I want eyes to see it in the face of all I pass, for grace misses no one, but leaves its mark on each, however hidden from the casual eye. May I be one who sees it, values it, makes room for its timid step. Grace often expresses itself most deeply by receiving rather than giving, by being blessed from the life of another, by delighting in the goodness leaking out between the slats of their tightly guarded hearts. Perhaps grace in my life, and even in my relationships, is increased most by welcoming it in rather than mustering it out.
Caroline came to me at work yesterday with an apology, “I’m sorry I was hard on you yesterday. I was slammed with a lot of issues I had to sort through and was feeling stressed.” I said that I understood. But she was not finished with her apology which rather quickly worked around to her frustration at me, still evident in her look and tone of voice, because I was apparently inadequate at my job. Tears had started pooling in my eyes when she finally finished her lecture and turned to leave.
Having no customers to attend, I had some space to reflect. Why did this exchange feel so bad to me? I was better than most at handling displeased customers and angry colleagues, able to be courteous and sympathetic without taking it personally. I felt the powerful emotional tug and followed the shame back to my childhood fears. This dynamic was very familiar, the sense that I was fundamentally flawed because I was too slow or stupid or inattentive. It was not simply that I had failed in this one thing as everyone does, but that I had failed in a way that others did not, at least not responsible ones. As a boy I figured dad would be patient with average mistakes, the kind he too made, so his frustration proved some deeper flaw in me. Children who paid more attention, who got it on the first explanation, who didn’t repeat the same mistake earned approval. I just had to try harder… but I could never quite overcome that achievement deficit. I was stuck in a permanent sense of inadequacy.
Now whether my dad was too impatient or I was too sensitive is beside the point… or rather it completely leads us down the wrong trail. The point is not to identify blame, but to identify dynamics–this is what happened and this is how it made me feel. And seeing that dynamic clearly, and being the melancholic that I am (tending to self-blame), I immediately noticed how I treat others in a similar way, especially those I supervise. My mind flashed back to the previous night when I had given an exasperated look and tone to a new student I was training because she wasn’t getting it. I could see her face fall, and realizing what I had done, I quickly changed into a non-judgmental re-explanation. But it passed through my mind as a common interaction, not something that called for further examination, one of those things I see as a flaw in myself that I need to work on, but with such a minimal focus that I make only incremental changes.
Okay, that is unfair to myself. I have actually grown a lot in this area. I just have a lot farther to go. If I’d had a little boy when I was my father’s age, I might have been much harder on him than my father was on me. It is nearly impossible to break out of family dynamics without a great deal of reflection and understanding… and grace to myself, not just to others. Given my temperament, I could easily turn this insight into self-blame, castigating myself for being hard on others and trying to scold myself into being more patient. But shaming myself just makes me feel even more inadequate, leading to further dysfunction in my life.
For me, this is where reflecting on my childhood becomes so powerful. When I find a reason for a deep-rooted unhealthy tendency in myself, when I can locate the pain I felt that I’m passing on to others, I can see myself with compassionate eyes, as the wounded one. I can grace myself into healthier interactions instead of criticizing myself into being better, a stick I used my whole life that simply drove me into deep, unremitting depression. I find that grace must begin with myself before I can pass it on. We live in a fallen world, we have all been wounded deeply, and tracing that injury back to its roots can give us the insight and self-compassion we need to finally begin healing under the gentle touch of God’s grace.
Janathan Grace Reflections 