prayer for today

Beyond understanding

There is a great deal that I do not understand. It is for this reason that I write here.

When people come to me with their pain, sometimes pain that goes beyond my imagining, there is nothing I can say to relieve it. I want to - but such words do not exist...

Psychotherapy falls short when someone is sobbing over the death of someone they love.

It makes little sense to try to teach someone to change their thoughts when their house has burned down and suddenly they have only the clothes on their back.

What can I offer someone who tells me that their father molested them or their mother abandoned them or their best friend had an affair with their spouse?

{If you think that I am writing about you, you are both right and wrong, for I have heard each of these things and more, from more than one person...}

I do not understand how or why these things happen. I wish I could give you the explanation that would make it all make sense and assure you that you will never be hurt again. But I cannot.

But I will invite you on a journey with me, a journey of words and images.




Let us see if together we can find hope...














Let us begin by looking more closely at the ordinary, at those simple things right in front of us.

Sometimes we may have to look very closely to see what is there.

What we see may only hint at possibility - a seed, something that may or may not become more.

It may be hard to trust.

(Does it look to you like she is looking at the grass and at the person holding the camera? It does to me.)

Sometimes there will be tears - we see the beauty but pain overrides; it just hurts too much.

We may feel alone at times, like we are standing on a slippery slope that has no bottom.

But neither you nor I are not alone. We are each unique and yet not. There are others like us.

We are meant to travel together, sometimes leading, sometimes following.

If we keep swimming, there is light up ahead.

(If you do not see it, follow me. Someone let me follow them a long time ago.)










There is One who has brought me healing (over and over) and who teaches me to offer healing as well. Let me show you one of His many, many faces. If you do not know Him or feel comfortable with that sort of belief, do not stress yourself over it. Just gaze at the beauty - see what I saw one day not long ago. The light was truly that bright and the shadow that dark (only a tiny edit of the photo was needed to make the poster below). I was standing across the street and something made me look...




"We love because He first loved us." (1 John: 4:19)

I have been blessed in this way - and so I love. I write and show you these images that you too may be so blessed. It may not happen all at once - in fact, it probably won't. But come - let us journey together - for we are not meant to journey alone...

(Click below to see the full web album of my spring photos, including these. I decided to narrow it down to my 50 favorites - a hard task! If you would like to watch them as a slide show, click on the button in the upper left; hit the escape button on your keyboard to stop the slide show. As always, you may download any photos for your own personal/nonprofit use.)

Spring, 2012

A note to myself

A note to myself today as I celebrate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus in the year 2012:

It is not an easy thing to believe in the resurrection. It seems perhaps easiest to believe in it when I am hearing the words and music of long-celebrated Easter prayers and rituals from my religious tradition. These draw up a deep emotional response that fills me with joy. This, however, does not constitute believing - for a well loved story or childhood song might do the same.

It also seems easy to believe in the resurrection when it is a beautiful spring day and the once gray sky is now a sea of blue, with brilliant sunlight flooding fresh leaves and blossoms. It is not so hard to believe that life can come from death when I see nature's cycle portraying this before my eyes. However, this too does not constitute believing in the resurrection.

To believe that Jesus rose from the dead is especially challenging to the scientific mind of our day. We have learned to believe only what can be "proven". We have been taught not to trust claims that cannot be substantiated. It is hard to believe in the resurrection because I have never personally known anyone who has "risen from the dead". No one I know has either.

And yet I believe.

I make this note to myself today though because I suspect that there will be days in my future when it will be even harder to believe than it is now. I have been fortunate that the pains and losses of my life thus far have been buffered by caring friends or circumstances that eased the blow. I have not yet experienced a loss that turned me inside out, a loss that sucked the air from my lungs and left me gasping. It is when I experience this that I will most need this note.

I believe and yet, it seems nearly impossible to express in words why it is I believe. I remember going through my young adult days when my religious faith had to pass a gauntlet of questions poured forth by my reasoning mind. I wouldn't accept believing in God only because I wanted it to be so. I had to work it out logically that there very well could be a God - or even more, that there must be a God. However, passing that test was only the beginning of my journey toward a resurrection faith.

And perhaps that is one of the most important "whys" of my believing - the journey. Believing has most certainly not been a single moment experience for me nor has it been a smooth straight line. Yet, as I reflect back over my life, I see so much evidence of resurrection. I recall so many times when light has emerged from darkness, hopelessness or fear. What is so especially important about these experiences though is that they didn't start with me. They did not occur because I was smart or because I worked hard or because I was a good person. They came as sheer gift. Completely undeserved - like someone (Someone?) loving me for no reason.

But this was only phase one of the journey. I then discovered that things were being expressed through me that surprised even me. I did not know what to say to a patient and something wise came out of my mouth. Or I found that a poem, painting or photograph "fell into place" to express something that startled me with its beauty. If I were the creator, how could it surprise me? What was expressed seemed to be given for others, much as it was for me, like Someone loving with a love that could not be deserved or earned.

All of this has taught me that there is something (Someone) far greater than anything I can see or prove. This awareness stirs forth from my heart, not from the logic of my mind. Yet it is, I believe, every bit as real of a knowing – perhaps more real. Hence, when I see what appears to be the end, I do not and shall not accept that as full reality but rather as an appearance. It may indeed be the end of one thing. But it may also be the beginning of something else - something much fuller, much richer than what it is that ended.

My belief in this resurrection, however, does not mean that I will always see this as true at the most painful moments. In fact, I probably won't. Much like the disciples of Jesus, I may doubt or reject the idea of resurrection. In my confusion of suffering, the possibility may not even occur to me. When this happens, I may scream and pound on things and feel like my life is over. But I don't want it to end there. Thus, this note to myself. A reminder of what I believe.

Having said all of this, I realize that I may still be lost when the time of great suffering strikes. And so, an image. A butterfly. A monarch butterfly. The one that can fly 2,500 miles to find the same roosting place its ancestors found the year before. It is not a strong or sturdy creature. It has no map. It has no language or intelligence. It simply has God.

And so have I.


(To my dear readers: below is my Easter gift to you. But before I could give it to you, it first was given to me, one of those experiences that fell into place, so to speak. Many blessings to you today, wherever you may be on your journey.)

Holy Week: words, images and sounds for the journey toward Easter

I apologize to anyone who has noticed that I haven't posted for almost a month. My life has been unusually busy - not over anything bad - just biting off more than I could chew with an online class and an online Lenten retreat at the same time. While both have been good, the retreat has been so good, so beautiful, so powerful - though not always easy. With other pilgrims on the Lenten journey, there has been much sharing of thoughts, struggles and art. I'd like to share a just a bit of what it has brought me to in these final days of Holy Week.

I have mentioned before my affiliation with www.abbeyofthearts.com through which this retreat was available. Our "abbess" (leader), Christine, has shared many wonderful ideas and images throughout. With her permission, I would like to share some of her thoughts. First, she talked about how we cannot rush to resurrection. Whether we are believers, skeptics or unbelievers, the tendency in all of us is to want to skip the hard, painful parts of life to get to the "Easter" experiences. The final path of Jesus was one of betrayal, rejection, physical pain and abandonment. To consider walking with Him, means walking through these experiences - and most assuredly, we do not want to. Let's just get to the colored eggs, the candy, the family dinner and not have to deal with the gut-wrenching loss of being put to death (whatever that means to each of us as individuals).

Yet we all know, believer or not, that we cannot escape these experiences. Our lives are, at best, dotted with them -  sometimes are filled with them. And one of our greatest challenges as human beings is to accept this part of our existence. These experiences can fill us with confusion, sometimes rage or despair. Where was this so-called loving God when I went through this? Where is He now when I most need Him?

I will show you in a moment where He was, where He is. First, I'd like to share some profound words offered by Christine in the retreat this week:

“We must know the terrible experience of loss wrought again and again in our world so that when the promise of new life dawns we can let it enter into us fully in the space carved by loss.”   
                                - Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

"in the space carved by loss" - these words struck me with great power when I first read them and they still do. I would never say that God sends us loss or pain or any of the other horrible things that afflict us just to accomplish some other purpose. That is not the God I believe in. However, the notion that loss creates a space in us which we can allow new life to fill is very consistent with the God I believe in. He can transform our pain if we give it to Him. Not only that though. He holds our pain and bears it with us. He becomes our pain and, in becoming it, He shares it more intimately than we could believe possible.


I said I would show you where He is/was when you were (or are) suffering. It may seem when I show you, that I am trying to preach the Christian message, to convert you to my religion. Please believe me that that is not my intent - for I respect wherever you may be with believing or not believing. (And if you don't want to continue to the end of this posting, that too is fine.) What I am sharing with you is an artistic expression of images that came from a sacred place within me during this retreat, along with harp strings playing the melody of an old spiritual: Were you there when they crucified my Lord? (I am not claiming good art or musicianship - simply a message coming from my heart.)

(To listen, click on the play button, then continue to scroll down for the images.)

(It does not end here. I hope to be posting again in a few days...)

 

Finding the compassion within...

As I write this, I am sitting in the waiting room of the Cleveland Clinic Neurological Center for Pain. (I am here for a consultation regarding my migraines.) It is a sobering thought to realize that the others sitting here with me are suffering from some affliction, some pain.

Perhaps more sobering though was a sight seen by random chance during the drive here. I was stopped at a traffic light when I saw an older man with a cane in each hand step off the curb ahead. He was wearing a dark trench coat against the wind and snow and had a stubble of a beard. Using the canes to steady himself, he patiently inched his way across the street in front of the waiting traffic. I could not imagine that he would reach the other side before the light changed – but he did. I sense that this slow, laborious movement was a fact of his life. He was not a patient waiting hopefully to see a specialist at a world class medical facility. He was just an old man making his way across the street.

It is not hard to feel compassion when, like this, we are in full view of the suffering of others. We can relate to their visible pain and struggle and wish for their relief as we might wish for our own. However, some sufferings are harder to relate to. Many kinds of pain are hidden from view. Behind the indifference, rudeness or anger of another may hide a hurting heart. Yet when we see someone being unkind, dismissive or worse, compassion for the perpetrator is not likely to arise easily, if at all.

Oddly, even more challenging for many of us is to find compassion for our own hurting selves. So many times I have heard people blame themselves, sometimes viciously, for things over which they have no control. I encounter many people who experience motor or cognitive impairments or physical pain brought on by random accidents or diseases. So many of them are angry – so often, with themselves – because they are the way they are. They feel they should be stronger and more able to overcome the suffering that holds them captive.

When it comes to mental and emotional pain, we seem to be even less tolerant of our suffering selves. It is not uncommon for me to encounter people who hate themselves because of things done to them when they were small children. They blame themselves for not having stopped it, as though a 4 year old could stop molestation or a 5 year old could be “good” enough to prevent a beating. Our adult minds can view another’s childhood suffering with compassion, but somehow our views of ourselves are much harsher, as though our child bodies had adult minds that should have known better.

And then there’s the big one. This is where our capacity for compassion almost always fails us: when we have done something we believe or know to be wrong. “How could I possibly have compassion for myself when I’ve done that?” we think.

Let me share a story. Recently I was corresponding with an online friend, also a therapist, and we were sharing some experiences from our pasts. As a result of this, I was drawn to reflect on an incident from my young adult days that had triggered much guilt and anxiety at the time. While this event had long since been worked through, re-opening it caused an old familiar twinge of discomfort. What happened next though was something entirely new: in this process of reflecting, I had been digging through a box of memorabilia and come across a photo. A photo of me when I was about the age I was when I did “the awful thing”. I looked at the photo and thought: “My God. How young I was.” I could see my youthfulness in my fresh skin and hair. But I could also see it in my soul. I was so young and knew so little about living. I found within me a deep compassion for this young woman, barely out of her teens… and a new level of healing started to unfold. I had always expected myself to do the right thing and to know what the right thing was. “How absurd”, I now realized, “how absurd to have expected that of myself.”

You too have a younger self. Many younger selves. Selves who did not know as much as you do now when they struggled to survive and meet your needs.  And if your younger self was hurt or damaged by abuse or neglect, that self may have remained “young”, i.e. it may not have developed properly with regard to judgments or choices, causing more pain and sorrow. May there not be compassion for these selves too?

With compassion comes Mercy, the great healer of all souls.

I invite you now, if you care to, to join me in a short meditation practice called a "metta" (or lovingkindness) meditation. While the concept is borrowed from Buddhism, it is religiously neutral, ie.g. not likely to be offensive to any formal religion or to those without a religion.

[While this meditation is often done with the eyes closed and the words said to oneself, I have set it up here with some photos taken on a recent walk and with my voice saying some words. I set it up this way for a couple of reasons. First, it helps to demonstrate the idea. Secondly, some people who have suffered trauma, may find themselves flooded with unpleasant thoughts or images when they close their eyes. Thus, if you find yourself in that position, you can use the photos and my voice to help you stay grounded. (If you are one of my patients, please keep me informed of any problems.) You may also change the words to make them more relevant for yourself - I chose the words I did as part of my own meditation. However, you may wish for other things - e.g. to be well, to be calm, to be free of suffering, etc. It is generally good for us to go through the 3 cycles as demonstrated as that can help us cultivate compassion more generally.]

love poem

sun and snow and tree

shadow on glistening white

heaven kissing earth

(this Haiku poem was prepared for the poetry party at www.abbeyofthearts.com)