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.