Author Archives: Eileen
I Apologize by Old and Blessed
If you’re reading this two-hundred years from now and the globe is simmering from sauna-like heat and humidity, I apologize. If crops are facing challenges never seen in human history, I apologize. If the oceans are slowly meandering to the back yards of coastal homes, I apologize. If it’s difficult to plan outdoor activities because you’ve no idea what the weather is going to be like from one minute to the next, I apologize. If you live in a world where death rates are elevated no matter the advancements in medical technology, I apologize. If the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened instead of contracting, I apologize. If history tells you that we were aware of what we should have done to give you a better inheritance, but we were too busy chasing money and too afraid of being woke, I apologize. My prayer is that you can fix the mess we gave you and that you will finally take the lessons history offered and make a better world. If you choose not to accept my apologies, I understand. I wish you Godspeed! I’m old and blessed…hope you
Is Our Suffering Redemptive for Others?
To me the root of sin is fear. We dull fear with pleasure and we try to fight it with power. And human power is an illusion…..as Adam and Eve found out. A tiny, microscopic germ can wipe us out. The question of why the good suffer is confusing. Perhaps accepting suffering and trusting the grace of God to get us through it is somehow redemptive not just for us, but possibly for those that don’t get it together with God until the last minute or even until they see God. This may be wishful thinking on my part because of being the matriarch of five generations, some of whom don’t seem to be getting it together with or without God in a world that is increasingly scary. Perhaps our suffering somehow helps those we love unconditionally. Perhaps like Jesus, we can say, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” If we who are imperfect can hurt for them and forgive, surely a God who is Love does.
Civil Dialogue, the Key to Empathy
Empathy is tricky. It’s different from caring. We can care about people without a clue as to what is going on inside them. And it’s easier to have empathy for people who are like us, who respond the way we do to things or ideas or people and who share our culture and language. Extreme differences can make us ill at ease around others. The differences can be in looks, color, age, mental or physical ability, nationality, economic, cultural or even religious.
My mother grew up in the early 1900’s in Mississippi. There were only a few Catholics there and they Polish immigrants who all lived in one neighborhood. As a child she believed the nuns she saw when passing their school on a bus wore headdresses because they had horns.
Though some people are more interested and curious than afraid of differences, most are not. And negative experiences with a person different from us can make us nervous around all others like them.
Empathy comes easier with people who are most like us. Without time spent in intentional dialogue with those different from us, it is impossible to understand them enough to trust them or work together.
At this time in our own nation, we have become drastically alienated from people who only differ in their politics. And communication across that ravine has become almost impossible. So even with all our similarities it is impossible to have empathy for one another.
Without goodwill civil dialogue is impossible. Our language, our demeanor, our tone, misinformation, projections from our painful experiences build walls of fear and anger. We are like wounded porcupines unable to kiss and make up.
Both sides have lost perspective on what damage this is doing to America. Violence is becoming more and more common and even acceptable. Nobody wins in a civil war. More Americans were killed in our civil war than in all our other wars. We don’t see that if we don’t learn to work together for the good of all, we will self-destruct as a Nation. Get rid mental and verbal barbed wire and reach out.
Healing
Healing Power and the Church
Father Richard critiques how, even within Christianity, we doubt the healing power of the gospel:
When religion is not about healing, it really doesn’t have much to offer people in this life. Many have called it “carrot on the stick” theology or, as my friend Brian McLaren says, we made the gospel largely into “an evacuation plan for the next world.” If we don’t understand the need and desire for healing, then salvation (salus, or healing) becomes a matter of hoping for some delayed gratification. We desperately need healing for groups, institutions, marriages, the wounds of war, violence, racism, and the endless social problems in which we are drowning today. But we won’t know how to heal if we don’t learn the skills at ground zero: the individual human heart.
For much of its history following CE 313 when Christianity became the imperial religion of the Roman Empire, the church’s concern was not healing, but rather maintaining social and church order: the doling out of graces and indulgences (as if that were possible); granting dispensations, annulments, and absolutions, along with the appropriate penalties; keeping people in first marriages at all costs, instead of seeing marriage itself as an arena for growth, forgiveness, and transformation for wife, husband, children, and the whole extended family, and beyond. In general, we tried to resolve issues of the soul and the Spirit by juridical means, which seldom works.
We’ve largely lost the very word healing in mainline Christian churches. Around the time I entered into ministry, there was a resurgence in the notion of healing prayer and healing services. Many Catholics thought, “Well, this must come from the Protestants; we’re not into healing!” And of course, they were right! Many Catholics didn’t expect to really become healed people in an inner or outer way. As priests, we felt our job was to absolve sin rather than help people to grow and heal. “Get rid of the contaminating element,” as it were, rather than “Learn what you can about yourself and God because of this conflict, pain, or suffering.” Those are two very different paths. In the four Gospels, Jesus did two things over and over again: he preached and he healed. We did a lot of preaching, but not too much healing. We didn’t know how.
I’m convinced that if preaching doesn’t effect some level of healing or transformation in the listener, then it’s not even the gospel being preached. Healing is the simplest criterion of preaching the word that I can imagine. The truth heals and expands us in its very hearing: “The truth will make you free” (John 8:32). It allows and presses us to reconfigure the world with plenty of room for gentleness and peace for ourselves, and for those around us. Only whole people can imagine or call forth a more whole world.
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
by Max Ehrmann ©1927
Empathy, the Key to Love
No one has all the truth and nothing but the truth even with the Holy Spirit. That would make us equal to God and that’s what in the creation story got Adam and Even into big trouble from the beginning. We are physically vulnerable and sentient creatures desperately wanting the safety of power. And knowledge is power. And power almost always corrupts and get’s misused. Jesus had knowledge and power! He could have used it for himself or just his own people. What did Jesus have that made him use it differently.
He had empathy.
When foreigners, sinners, turncoat Jewish tax collectors, the lepers of his time society, and even the enemy Roman soldier came to him in need, he saw them as fellow human beings, fragile, imperfect, frightened and in pain. Ultimately he even saw the self-righteous religious leaders who got him tortured and killed with empathy.
“Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”
This came even after the terror of foreseeing his own suffering made him sweat blood and plead for there being an easier way.
Acceptance came not through faith, but through empathy which frees us to love the unlovable. It freed him to love even his best friends who denied and abandoned him. Jesus had empathy, the gift of understanding even those without empathy. He understood those different from him both inside and outside.
Empathy for others involves a dying to self, to the limits of our own ways of seeing and understanding, to our own values and way of being in the world. Empathy frees us to understand not just those like us, but even those whose ways of seeing and being in the world are totally different from ours.
Empathy doesn’t make us see the world the same way, but it allows us to understand and forgive and to care.
And that is LOVE.
For All God’s Beloved Imperfect Children
Releasing Any Need for Perfection
Drawing on personal experience, Father Richard offers an encouraging reminder that we don’t need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted by God.
We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move our rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It’s in doing it wrong, making mistakes, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are led to total reliance upon God. I wish it weren’t true, but all I know at this point in my journey is that God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right.
I believe this is why Christianity has as its central symbol of transformation a naked, bleeding man who is the picture of failing, losing, and dying, yet who is really winning—and revealing the secret pattern to those who will join him there. Everyone wins because, if we’re honest, the one thing we all have in common is weakness and powerlessness in at least one—though usually many—areas of our lives. There’s a broken, wounded part inside each of us. [1]
In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard explains how he has been freed from his tendency to focus on “what’s wrong” with himself, others, and the world:
As a perfectionist by nature, accepting that things aren’t perfect has been at the center of my life’s inner struggle. I’m always seeing the wrong of everything. At the same time, I haven’t wanted to let “what’s wrong” drive the show—in myself and others. I want to be perfect, and I want other people to be perfect—but of course, the only perfection available to us is the ability to embrace the imperfect.
What I like to call “holy dissatisfaction” gave me my instinct for reform, but it also chewed me up. In the first half of my life, I was constantly thinking, “It’s not supposed to be that way!” I was constantly noticing, “That isn’t it! That isn’t it!” It’s only in the second half of my life that I am finally able to live in the holy tension of accepting that a “remnant” or “critical mass” is enough. Scattered in each group are always a few who get it, a few who live and love the gospel. When that became enough, and even more than enough (even in myself), I was free. So, this scriptural image of “remnant” or “yeast”—to use Jesus’ words—is very important for me and my own liberation. If I’m going to wait for the reign of God to be fully realized before I can be happy, I’m never going to be happy.
Mirrors
Quite a few years ago I had to deal with the shock of realizing that I am a difficult person. I have worked on the high maintenance, unrealistic, side of me with a tiny bit of success, though there is always definitely the problem of backsliding. The upside of painful self-awareness is being able to love other imperfect, because of being human people even when they irritate me. This is a magical grace, because if frees me to see past flaws to the good in others. I admit that on any given day it’s a toss-up whether I can do this. But when I can remember and rest in the love of God for flawed me, it’s much easier. Particularly when what irritates me most is usually what I don’t face in myself.
Eileen:
Our tendency to make “image” our God is a spiritual issue. Years ago becoming aware of my weakness of envy helped me recognize that I use sarcastic humor to “cut people I envy down to my size.” We all possess natural strengths and talents, as well as corresponding weaknesses. We naturally want others to admire our strenghts and overlook our weaknesses. Pointing out others’ weaknesses through sarcasm is an attempt to level the playing field.
Working with a Spiritual director many years ago made we aware of my unrecognized feelings of inferiority and attempts to bring others down to my level with cutting humor. Recognizing and accepting areas that I felt weak in helped me start accepting my humanity and quit trying to “cut people down to my size.” But later in life, having had to admit to failures to use my own gifts effectively, I had to recognize that I had resurrected that leveling weapon and was using it on people with similar personalities and talents to mine who had used them more effectively. Facing our inborn weaknesses is one thing. Facing our failure to effectively use our gifts for the benefit of others is a much harder challenge.
Father Richard Rohr writes of “the integration of the negative.” Rather than insisting that God values perfection or an idealized morality, Francis of Assisi intuited, through the example of Jesus’ life and death, that God could be found in all things, even those our religion and culture urge us to reject. Father Richard writes:
I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the “integration of the negative.” Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus’ revolutionary good news, the apostle Paul’s deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare of Assisi lived out with such simple elegance.
The integration of the negative still has the power to create “people who are turning the whole world upside down” as was said of early Christians (see Acts 17:6). Today, some therapists call this pattern of admitting our shortcomings and failures “embracing our shadow.” Such surrendering of superiority, or even a need for superiority, is central to any authentic enlightenment. Without it, we are misguided ourselves and poor guides for others.
Francis and Clare made what most would call the negative or disadvantage shimmer and shine by their delight in what the rest of us ordinarily oppose, deny, and fear: things like being insignificant, poor, outside systems of power and status, or weakness in any form. Francis generally referred to these conditions as minoritas. This is a different world than most of us choose to live in. We all seem invariably to want to join the majority and to be admired. Francis and Clare instead made a preemptive strike at both life and death, offering a voluntary assent to full reality in all its tragic wonder. They made a loving bow to the very things that defeat, scare, and embitter most of us, such as poverty, powerlessness, imperfection, and being ridiculed.
I personally think that honesty about ourselves and all of reality is the way that God makes grace totally free and universally available. We all find our lives eventually dragged into opposition, problems, “the negatives” of sin, failure, betrayal, gossip, fear, hurt, disease, etc., and especially the ultimate negation: death itself. Good spirituality should utterly prepare us for that instead of teaching us high-level denial or pretense.
Needing a ladder to climb only appeals to our egotistical consciousness and our need to win or be right, which is not really holiness at all—although it has been a common counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history. The Ten Commandments are about creating social order (a good thing), but the eight Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12) of Jesus are all about incorporating what seems like disorder (a negative),which promotes a much better and different level of consciousness. ( Richard Rohr)
Recognizing our failures and knowing that God has already forgiven us is the grace for forgiving ourselves. And that can free us to grow and even change. (Eileen)
Oneness
Guru Nanak: A Sage Warrior
In an interview for the Daily Meditations, Sikh activist Valarie Kaur tells a brief story of Guru Nanak (1469–1539), founder of the Sikh faith:
The story goes that every morning a man named Nanak sat by a river and meditated on the world and took the pain of the world into his heart until it crescendoed inside of him. One morning he did not return from the river. People thought him a dead man, a drowned man. The sun rose and the sun fell. The sun rose and the sun fell. And on the third day, a figure was spotted, seated in a cemetery covered in ash. It was Nanak, but not Nanak. He had been rebirthed in those waters and his first utterance was “Nako Hindu. Nako Musliman.” There is no Hindu. There is no Muslim. This was more than treat your neighbor as you would yourself. This was more than taking in the stranger. This was: There is no stranger. There is no you-against-me at all. We constitute each other. [1]
Kaur describes how his followers transformed their culture:
[Nanak] began to sing powerful mystical poetry, accompanied by a Muslim bard. For twenty-four years, Guru Nanak traveled in each of the cardinal directions on foot…. Everywhere he went, his songs held a vision that landed in people’s hearts: We can all taste the truth of Oneness, and when we do, we are inspired to care for one another, and fight for one another. Perhaps what was most powerful about Guru Nanak is how he distilled the mystical heart of all the world’s wisdom traditions into its essence: love.
Guru Nanak’s followers were called Sikhs, seekers or students…. Sikhs believed that people of all castes, genders, faiths, races, and places were equal…. It was a radical experiment that rebelled against the caste hierarchy and feudal order of the era, a mysticism that inspired revolutionary social change…. The ideal archetype in the Sikh tradition became the sant sipahi: the sage warrior. [2]
Kaur’s grandfather’s example shaped the trajectory of her work:
My grandfather was the first sage warrior I knew…. Papa Ji tied his turban every day, clasped his hands behind his back, and surveyed the world through the eyes of wonder. When he listened to kirtan, sacred music, he closed his eyes and let the music resound wondrously within him; he wrote poetry in his garden….
As I fell asleep each night, Papa Ji would sing the Mool Mantr, the foundational verse that opens the Guru Granth Sahib, our sacred canon of musical wisdom. It begins with the utterance “Ik Onkar,” which means Oneness, ever-unfolding. “All of Sikh wisdom flows from here,” Papa Ji would say. All of us are part of the One. Separateness is an illusion: There is no essential separateness between you and me, you and other people, you and other species, or you and the trees. You can look at anyone or anything and say: You are a part of me I do not yet know. [3]
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 