Risen One, come, meet me in the garden of my life.
Lure me into elation. Revive my silent hope. Coax my dormant dreams. Raise up my neglected gratitude. Entice my tired enthusiasm. Give life to my faltering relationships. Roll back the stone of my indifference. Unwrap the deadness in my spiritual life. Impart heartiness in my work.
Risen One, send me forth as a disciple of your unwavering love, a messenger of your unlimited joy.
Resurrected One, may I become ever more convinced that your presence lives on, and on, and on, and on.
Don’t get rid of the pain until you’ve learned its lessons. When you hold the pain consciously and trust fully, you are in a very special liminal space.This is a great teaching moment where you have the possibility of breaking through to a deeper level of faith and consciousness. Hold the pain of being human until God transforms you through it. And then you will be an instrument of transformation for others.
As an example of holding the pain, picture Mary standing at the foot of the cross. Standing would not be the normal posture of a Jewish woman who is supposed to wail and lament and show pain externally. She’s holding the pain instead, as also symbolized in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. She’s trying to say, “There’s something deeper happening here. How can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?” Until you find a way to be a transformer, you will pass the pain onto others.
Jesus on the cross and Mary standing by the cross are images of transformative religion. They are never transmitting the pain to others. All the hostility that had been directed toward them—the hatred, the accusations, the malice—none of it is returned. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection! That’s the core mystery. It takes our whole life to comprehend this, and then to become God’s “new creation” (Galatians 6:15). The imperial ego hates such seeming diminishment.
Unfortunately, we have the natural instinct to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego always insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until you move to a deeper level where it all eventually makes sense in the great scheme of God and grace. — Richard Rohr adapted from The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered
I got the loveliest piece of affirmation lately- and in work of all places! A wonderful woman with whom I had an authentic conversation suggested jokingly that I should carry a "Warning You Are Entering a Safe Zone" sign. It left me thinking that when I am at my best, I create a safe space for others to be fully themselves, in hurt or in joy, in play or in anger. In authenticity. When it happens, I am humbled and privileged to share the space with them. My inner light is in this space, where others' inner lights are laid bare and nurtured.
Wayne Hutchinson laid bare his inner light, strength, insight and solidarity this week. What struck me is his reference to depression as a "companion". I know there is something in trying to accept some of our struggles so that we don't lose so much energy in denying them. However, I still see mental health challenges as more of a cross than a companion. The true companions (or angels) that I saw in his story were his niece, his mum and his GP:
As I walk downstairs, drying the tears on my cheeks, I encounter the most beautiful of smiles, worn by my beautiful two-year-old niece, whose face bears the look of someone without a care in the world, the way all kids should be.
I ask her for a hug and she lovingly obliges. This small hug from a little girl will get me through this day. That hug felt like the best one I’ve ever received. It’s just what I needed.
...
I called my Mother for help – she’d been in and out my room to me for days, trying to help, but I was too scared to even speak to her. Really f**king scared.
Eventually I found my voice in her company. She listened to what I had to say and we both cried together. It was tough, so tough, but she promised she’d do all she could to help me. Mothers are great that way.
...
You talk, he [the GP] listens. You feel a level of relief in the face of all that pain you’ve been through: the sleepless nights, the tears, the empty soul, the darkness that surrounds your world.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about a moment some years ago when I experienced the nurturing security of companionship at a time when I felt like I was falling apart. I was experiencing debilitating depression, had lost my confidence and sense of self and felt unable to face the world and unworthy to inflict myself upon it. I was not getting out of bed let alone leaving the house. A friend of mine called over and didn't tell me to look on the bright side or list all the things I had going for me or drag me out into a world I wasn't able to deal with. Instead, he got into the bed beside me, put an arm around me and joined me in my darkness. I was not alone.
Thank God, it is a while since I've been so low that that level of lethargy, fear of the world and letting down everyone in it (including myself) have been so unrelenting as to block out the light. Admittedly, I still have real panicked moments where I cry to God that I cannot bear to live my life with this as a persistent feature. In my more even moments, I see the blessing in how this enables me to sense others hurting, be compassionate and journey with them in solidarity, understanding my brother or sister's fear and darkness as my own. (We are one in Christ/humanity/whoever your God). It allows me to do, in my own way, as my cherished friend taught me- to get in under the covers and hold others in my heart, join them in their hurt and hold on until, God willing, the grip loosens just enough to fathom that no shadow can exist without light.
Somewhere in all of this I grew in faith. I came to know a Jesus who joins us in our suffering while promising ultimate triumph over the worst of it.
In the inner chambers of your heart, God steps past all your talent and hard work — all that you would think he values. He goes straight for the messy, broken places in you because it’s there that you can truly discover him. This is the way he frees your heart to love, to risk, to grab hold of life for the joy that’s there. — Paula Rienhart from Strong Women, Soft Hearts
I'll finish with a prayer from Michael Leunig's A Cartoonist Talks to God:
Abba Father,
We pray for the fragile ecology of the heart and the mind. The sense of meaning. So finely assembled and balanced and so easily overturned. The careful, ongoing construction of love. As painful and exhausting as the struggle for truth and as easily abandoned.
Hard-fought and won are the shifting sands of this sacred ground, this ecology. Easy to desecrate and difficult to defend, this vulnerable joy, this exposed faith, this precious order. This sanity.
We shall be careful. With others and with ourselves.
