changes IV: naming the pain

I was talking to my quiet and thoughtful friend Ben recently when he quietly commented that there is a lot of sorrow in the world. The older you get, he said, the more you realize that it doesn't stop. The comment stuck with me. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another conversation I had with another friend recently opened up a world of pain in their life which I had been unaware of, and the question was thrown into the air with the ambivalence which we knew had moved through frustration and anger: how are we expected to respond when these things happen? And with an exhaustion that only hopes grace can get us out we ask “why?” hardly expecting an answer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Personally, (because I'm poor at writing at things less than personal and other than self-oriented) I don't know why things got bad, though I know they could've got worse. Still, why? Why did I have to go so long without feeling happy? Why did I have to feel fear of the coming pitfall when I was otherwise manic? Why did i feel so alone? I don't know the answers, but with honesty I am beginning to see that the experience and the healing has made me better, somehow, now. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sometimes we, people, are really too weak to help anyone else. This is where the humility which comes with our own brokenness could be a subtle blessing. It allows us to accept help. And when we do get back up, albeit limping, with what grace is given us to extend our frail hands to another, we do. And we do so not out of religious obligation in the mandated sense, but out of spiritual thankfulness in the love sense. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I guess it took a few months of community healing before I began to think about giving back- and at first it was stiff. Now, a year on, its beginning to flow more naturally. It seems to be coming involuntarily from thankfulness for what has become and what never got worse. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anne Lamott put it so nicely:

“Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk.”

This natural response is so much more beautiful, to me, than the religiosity which religion becomes when we put obligation on our fallen souls, or the stress Ben Franklin must have felt when he kept track of his goodness in relation to his keeping his 13 virtues. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lamott wrote that

“'Thanks' is a huge mind shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.”

These days this is the only approach that seems to work to readjust my self-obsessed view of others onto the equilateral field of God's creations on a plane of grace. I want to start at His grace, in my bustedness, and at my thankfulness for it.

changes III: church for real?

...

I've recently realized that I've been experiencing church on a whole new level. It hasn't been the show up sit down and leave of my childhood. Nor has it been the work-horse base of operations model of my missionally indoctrinated teens. Much of my church community has been taking place outside the formal structure now- something I might have advocated for in my idealistic teens when I thought the early church model aught to be copied in all its rootsy informality, but which is now, rather, happening more organically than an ideal. I like it. Here's the thing; this organic and informal community has helped me become and want to become a more decent person, and, I think, for a different impulse than the former paradigms offered. As I've been healed by the giving of those around me I have slowly found the ability and desire to give, again, as well. These, no-strings-attached relationships have felt completely fresh, new, and liberating. Like beauty for beauty's sake: a tree for standing. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In church we have been surfing through the book of Ephesians, which I take to be very much about God's enormous love for us, and our response in bearing with each others' weaknesses with an eye to our own. This begins to make sense to me. This also is very beautiful. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is a sidenote: I used to try to get to know people by digging straight into their lives, skipping past where they work and where they're from to who they are and what kind of experiences defined them. It was an approach that didn't get me far. Maybe I wanted people know those kinds of things about me, but, to be honest, if I were asked by the same person I was asking I probably wouldn't answer either. Instead, the community I've come to know rests on a slow and steady and safe sharing of “how was your week?”, and “do you have plans for the summer?”, and “what did you get up to today?” These things mean more when asked with consistency and concern than I knew they could. And maybe, one day, as the fire burns down and we've finished off the marshmallows, “how did you get here?” But no hurry.

changes II: reasons to be better

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In my teens I was lucky enough to have a friend/mentor who emphasized a concept of personal integrity: the idea being that who you were when no-one was watching aught to be in tandem with your life the rest of the time. It was about having depth of character. But when no-one seems to be watching at all, any time, ever, however, I have found that rational for self-improvement and self-worth can diminish substantially. Even more, I think, if we find God to be absent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Loneliness is a curse. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was reading this book on loneliness in which E. White discusses how loneliness can be something like a feedback loop. An isolated person may become even more wary of others through being isolated and instead of being drawn toward relationship, is repelled from it. White quotes from Robert Lane's thoughts on his finding that companionship levels recorded in the United States over 20 years fell. The bit I put in italics is what I found most compelling.

"I think that the data shows that you're more likely to be at home with your TV set than you are to be visiting with someone, and when we replace companionship with aloneness we lose the unconscious validation that we're all right, that what we do and think is the right thing to do. The data show that Americans are more anxious than anybody, and I think that's because they feel as though they don't belong."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the movie "Cast Away", Tom Hanks' character spends upwards of four years in solitude, with his friends believing him dead. In this vacuum of community he finds only shards of purpose to pull him against all hope- the idea that he might return to the woman he loved is one that he clings to, even against rational. Where no-one could call him to account for life, he finds a purpose to hold onto his humanity. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At the end of the film he is talking to his best friend about his experience. "I knew I had lost her" he says, speaking of the woman he left when his plane went down; "I had power over nothing."

"That's when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket... I had to stay alive, somehow. I had to keep breathing, even though there was no reason to hope and all my logic said I would never see this place again. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "So that's what I did. I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And one day that logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in and gave me a sail, and now here I am. And I've lost her all over again. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I am so sad I don't have Kelly, but I am so grateful that she was with me on that island. And I know what I have to do now. I gotta keep breathing, because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Realizing that you can't save yourself is a valuable lesson which is only taught through experience. Despair was like looking over the edge and feeling gravity pulling me over. So what can I claim? A shred of hope? A sliver of faith? God's grace through providence, clothed in guise of blind luck? The promise that a mustard seed was enough? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About this time last year I decided to lean into this remnant once more, even though I felt so damn tired. I had pretty much resolved that if I didn't find something like community by summer's end that I would be leaving town, shaking the dust off my feet as I did. I made a resolution to stop drinking and smoking- trying to do my part to turn a leaf, but in the end feeling that the catalyst could only be people who created substance. Losing Wilson was only a forgone necessity. Incredibly, it happened. I did not move out of town in September, and against my fears that what I'd begun to discover would dissipate with the pace of autumn, I instead continued with this collection of souls which began to heal my helpless self. I don't know that anything in life is as beautiful as real community. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Community. Roll that word around in your mouth. At some point in our lives some of us have decided that this is a utopian ideal which only exists on sitcoms, and not, if less perfectly in real life. But if community isn't meant for us, then why do we get so upset when a character on our sitcom leaves the show? Unless this sitcom character is going to walk out of the screen and into my world I need real people to give my life a vector- to create a storyboard with; to be colors of accent against mine on the canvas of life. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By which we find meaning. By which we find an account, and in that account our story is written, and as we read it, we determine to make it better. We lift up the heroics of others. We are simply glad to be in a good story, and by good we never mean perfect. By good we mean purposeful. And in the purpose we find hope, and in hope, a reason to have integrity, to want to become a better person.