SMALL WORLD

I was reminded recently how small one's world can become.  She has been ill and in the hospital for weeks. The world has shrunk to being about her and her body. The attention is on the disease and the doctors and nurses focus on her and the bacteria that will not respond to the treatment.

When I have visited, I want to know all that is going on. (When we get anxious we seek more and more data,  hoping that if we can just understand what is happening we might be able to do something about it). I am tempted to keep the attention on her and her disease, her care, her pain, her energy, her prognosis.

But, then she asked me "How are YOU ALL doing."  The emphasis was on "YOU ALL".  And I was reminded of what I have always known: When we are sick our world can shrink and smother us. We need to know what else is going on.  There is so much of our time when the pain and fear of our own suffering can't be avoided that we long for something that takes us outside of ourselves.

So, when you are with people who are suffering disease or caught in the slog of sadness over loss, share with them their suffering. Be open to walking with them in their pain.  But, also bring your own life into them and give them a taste of the rest of the world.  Help open them up to the reality of life as they have known it so that they can feed off the hope for a life that is large enough that they don’t suffocate. 

OOPS!

Some years ago a new Interstate loop was added to the highway system where I lived.  The first time I drove on it, I saw a sign beside the highway that said, "This Lane Does Not Exist."

"What?"  What do they mean, "This Lane Does Not Exist"?  It does exist.  I am driving in it.

Each time I drove that highway, I had an argument with the sign makers.  I kept telling myself and which ever ghost was riding with me in the car at the time, "I know the lane exists. I am driving in it.  I just don't understand."

One day, after the highway had been opened for a couple of years, I drove the route and the sign said, "This Lane Does Not Exit."  Really, that is what it said.  The lane does not exit.  "When did they change the sign?"   

Well, I doubt that they changed the sign. I think I changed my glasses.  Somehow my first impression, which was wrong, got stuck in my mind. I looked hard at the sign every time I passed it and never saw the absence of the "S". I was so convinced that it said, "This Lane Does Not Exist" that I couldn't see what it really said.

I wonder how many other wrong perceptions I get stuck on? I wonder how many first impressions I have that do not really represent reality? 

I don't know, but I have been thinking about it lately. I guess sometimes it is important to "unlearn" what we "know" so we can discover what is real.

GOD'S EYES

“Do you know what those round balls are?” Michael asked me as we were standing at the hotel door beside the 12th century city hall which made up the front of the hotel.

He was referring to 2 beach ball sized spheres which each had blood shot looking eyes on the circumference.  The balls were hanging from the railing on one side of the kidney shaped crystal pool.  

“To keep the birds away?” 

“Right.  They think they are the eyes of a predator.  It scares them away from the pool.”

I wondered.  “How many times have I been scared away from something that I wanted to do because of the manufactured eyes of a predator?”

It doesn’t seem to matter if the eyes are blind or not.  It they appear to be watching, do I run from something that is potential nurturing?

And, I wondered, “How much of my early childhood was spent worrying about God’s eyes watching me as some predator who might do me harm?”  

I was raised in a family where the eyes of the divine were used to scare us into good behavior.  Did I believe God was a predator who could do me harm if I didn’t stay on the straight and narrow?  Or, were they simply dead eyes who were filled with power because of the imagination of a scared little boy who projected onto them the power to see and the strength to harm?

And how many times do I fail to act with bold brashness or courage because I believe there are eyes watching me and might do me harm if I act?  How many times do I fail to speak because someone might judge me or hurt me if they didn’t like what they saw or heard?

If God is our ultimate concern, then the sighted or blind eyes of what we care about most take on power to control our behavior.  And they keep us from trying the new, the risky, the unusual, the bazaar.   

So, I guess the theological question is, “Are God’s eyes just round beach balls with blood-shot pupils painted on the circumference which are designed to scare us away from an interesting and exciting life, or do they live with a sensing sensation, observing us with tender tears, feeling with us the ache and pain of mistakes and the delight and joy of love?”

I don’t know, but I wonder.

WEAVINGS

With courage she shared in the group. It was people gathered to grieve and discover new life. She was there partly because she had lost her son.  He died young. We were discussing how one gets beyond the pain and agony. She said that she had identified her feelings as despair.  Others nodded.  Unrelenting sadness often hardens into despair.

She shared with us that what had helped her was finally coming to accept that this would always be part of who she now is. When she quite fighting despair and accepted it as a permanent part of her new self, she said that it was easier to live with it.

One of the normal ways of trying to deal with pain, sadness, despair, is to try to excise it. We try to get around it or over it. We don't like how it feels. It is a thorn in the flesh.

But, the poignant confession of our friend in the retreat points to a way to deal with that inescapable pain. She realized that it would not go away.  It was too attached to her love for her deceased son. It was part of him. So, she accepted it as part of her. And rather than tear it away, she accepted it and began weaving it into the tapestry of her becoming life.

Loss tears a hole in the sense of who we are and how we know ourselves. We take the tattered threads of the rip in the fabric of our soul, seek to discover the new threads that the loss has given us to weave with, and then busy ourselves with the new identity that we might become.  With trembling fingers, exhausted by trying to hold ourselves together, we tenderly take our pain, our sadness, our despair, and begin weaving our life together.

The tapestry will never be the same. We become new. And that which was and that which is gone becomes forever woven into the fabric of our lives.

MEANING IN LIFE

I see lots of bumper stickers I don’t agree with. Occasionally I see one that makes me think.  The other day I saw this: “The meaning of life is to live it”. I had to ponder that one for a while.

And I don’t think I agree with it. I think the events of our lives are lived. But, I think the meaning of life is lived events storified. That is, I think events happen and we experience them. But what they mean is how we tell the stories of those events.

Stories are like pearls. Calcified life.  Life was lived and then we create stories of the lived experiences. Those stories are the way we want to remember what happened to us. They become the permanent containers for the events we have experienced.

And those stories get strung together like pearls on a string to create what we believe about ourselves. We remember and tell stories that give an image of who we are—both to ourselves and to others. Frequently, those stories are strung together in different ways depending on whether we are trying to tell ourselves who we are or if we are trying to communicate it to others.

The art we create by the stories we tell and the way we string them together is the meaning of our lives.

Now, when there is an event that interrupts the flow of the story—when the artful meaning we create with the way we string our stories together is disrupted by a major loss—we have to re-story our lives. We have to find a way to put that event in the flow to create a new meaning.

So, I think meaning of life is more about how we string together the stories of our lived experience than simply living life.