LIGHT INSIDE

He was afraid of the dark. He cried and so his parents put a night light in his room.  With the warm glow of a few watts, he was comforted and went to sleep. From early childhood, we believe that if there is light coming into us,we will be OK. We somehow think that our sense of well-being comes from outside ourselves.

But Barbara Brown Taylor, in a recent article in the Christian Century, tells of a man who helped her see a deeper truth. In his book, And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran, a blind French resistance fighter during WWII, wrote about going blind as a child. Only 10 days after he went blind, he made a discovery that influenced the rest of his life. "I had completely lost the sight of my eyes; I could not see the light of the world anymore. Yet the light was still there. . . . The source of light is not in the outer world. We believe that is is only because of a common delusion. The light dwells where life also dwells: within ourselves." (The Christian Century, April 2, 2014)

"The light dwells where life also dwells: within ourselves." I sometimes lament how much time I have spent in my life expecting light to come from the outside of myself. How much time I have wasted waiting for someone else to affirm my worth? How many insights I have missed because I looked for others to give me answers to  my life's issues? How much energy have I spent seeking clarity from the lights that flash unrelentingly from culture's values?

Light dwells where life exists. And life exists within each of us. Life, in its glory and pain, in its delight and hurt, in it tenderness and roughness, plays itself out within our hearts and souls. If we take time to pay attention to that life, to the heartbeat of our soul, the light that illumines us will not go out when it get's dark around us. 

#FWBL

There is a new TV show that has piqued my interest. It is #FWBL. It stands for Friends with Better Lives.  It is a comedy that centers around six friends who each think the other has a better life. This new show is not really new at all--it is simply a recurring show that plagues human life. We call it envy.

Envy is a discontentment that we feel when we look at others lives or possessions and desire to have what they have. It is driven by our perception of other's lives as having qualities that we find lacking in our own lives. We measure our reality according to our perception of the reality of another and focus on what we lack compared to the other. Envy focuses on only one part of who the other fully is. 

In the history of the church, this is one of the seven deadly sins. That is, it is something that alienates us from God and neighbor.  Ancient church theologian Thomas Acquinas says that envy is the opposite of charity. "Charity rejoices in our neighbor's good, while envy grieves over it." Charity, or love is that which is of God and when we love, we connect with the holy one. To look at what another has and to wish you had it instead of their having it is to separate yourself from those bonding experiences that love helps create.

And, it often results in blinding us to the gifts of life that we do have. Our perception of others lives is limited to what we can see and what we assume is happening. Our experience of our own lives is more complex and confusing and therefore may look like it not as good.  But, the reality is that most people live confusing and conflicted lives.  Most people are a jumble of delight and pain, joy and suffering.  Most people have self-doubt and deep fear and anxiety that tends to rob them of their happiness and contentment.

When we see others in a more realistic life, we can live with more empathy. We can see that, while they have somethings that we might wish we have, they also live with the same frustrations and fears that often plague our lives.  When we see that, love, compassion, charity are more likely to be our response. When that happens, we discover the presence of God who is loving connection.

ANTICIPATORY GRIEF

She said to me, "He has been grieving all through her illness. It won't be as hard for him when she dies, will it?" Sometimes we want this to be true. When someone is diagnosed with a terminal disease and has a long period of suffering on the journey of death, we want to believe that when they die, part of the grieving will be over.

But, my experience and observation teaches me that anticipation of endings and endings themselves are two different losses and therefore require distinct and individual grieving. When someone is diagnosed and is sick, the loss is significant. The person has lost their sense of vulnerability and sense of a future. They are aware that there are limits to their life. The relationship moves from mutuality to one of care giving and dependency. Everyone in the family has to learn to live in the absence of the way things used to be. They grieve the loss of the way relationships were lived.

But, when someone dies, the whole picture changes. The presence of a person, even when they are ill, is still a presence on which everyone depends. Everyone develops ways of living and caring which reflect the love and compassion they feel for each other. But, when that person dies, each person has to learn to live in the absence of their presence. There is a finality to the relationship which was not fully appreciated before the death.

So, people who have had significant losses after a long illness still have to grieve the full impact of the ending of a person's life. Therefore, don't try to discount their feelings because someone they love was ill for a long time. The extended time of care-giving and grieving the previous losses only means that the person begins this grieving process more exhausted than they would have otherwise.  Grief is particular and individual. We grieve loss whenever their are significant changes. Be patient with each other.

NO REGRETS

I have heard people say that we ought to live so that when we die we will have no regrets.  I have thought about that and wondered how that might be possible.  I have concluded that for most humans, it is an impossibility.

Regret is a word that means "a feeling of remorse or sorrow for a fault, act, loss, disappointment, etc." (Dictionary.com). We live with some popular misconceptions that sorrow is somehow a bad thing. Some people think that one ought to live with eyes only on the positive--the gains--the gifts.  

But, who among us has not lost something that we wanted or been disappointed because life didn't work out the way we wanted it to?  Regret is the normal human response to our complex and interesting humanity that dreams of that which is not. Those dreams are our imagination filling in the future with possibilities that have not yet been realized. The greater the imagination, the more dreams one has.  The more dreams one has the more disappointments one will experience.  Not all dreams can be fulfilled.  To fulfill one dream is to lose another dream.  Thus regrets.

So, I don't think we ought to live so as to have  "no regrets" when we die.  To do that is to live a small life. I think we live with dreams, leaning into the unknown future with multiple possibilities, and then learn to grieve the loss of those dreams that don't get fulfilled.  When we do this, we feel excitement of hope and possibility, the disappointment of unfulfilled dreams, the sadness that accompanies loss of possibilities, and in this experience, we discover more about who we are and who we might become.

And then we grieve, we allow our discoveries to form our imagination for our future, and we open up to the limited reality of tomorrow. We learn from our regrets and we create new visions for our future. 

MARKERS

Deb and I are celebrating 10 years of marriage today. We looked at the pictures of our wedding and rejoiced in that event all over again. We loved seeing our friends and family gathered to celebrate our commitment to each other. 

Anniversaries of special events are important times. They are markers that remind us of the giftedness of life. Life, filled with moments like rain drops swallowed and merged into a raging river, often races by. We speed past the people and the events that contribute to who we are and who we are becoming. Routine creates a level of comfort and the clock ticks it's time and the next thing you know, 10 years has gone by. Markers, special celebrations, slow us down to notice.

When we looked at the pictures of ourselves at the wedding, we wondered, "Who are those people?" Neither of us could quite remember who we were 10 years ago. We have shared loss and love, joy and pain. We have worked out the way to enrich each other's life, offering who we have been and who we are becoming. The struggles to make sense of our lives, the bringing together the distinct resources that each has been given and committing them to creating our life of love and blessing, have created new creatures.

On those special days when we mark our memory, when we look back at who we were and quietly assess who we are now, we are humbled by the sheer mystery of life's journey. We rejoice in the miles we have traveled, the tears we have shed, the laughter we have enjoyed. We have held each other in our pain and our love, wrestled with differences till we discovered the blessing in them, and helped each grow into the people we are today. 

Mark the special events of your life. In so doing you will discover the moments on which your life is built.