Part 12: Reconnecting to Life10/17/2008 8:18:13 AM I discovered when I was deep in the midst of working on an issue, I often felt isolated. As I moved closer to resolution, I began to reconnect to people and life. I learned to recognize this feeling of oneness with others as a signal I was nearing the end of processing whatever issue I was working through at that time. Sometimes the connection felt good; at other times is brought grief. Journal Entry Does that—wanting people to understand me--come from not wanting to feel the need to expend energy to place limits on people? If they think the way I do or at least understand me, then I don’t have to take the energy to explain myself, defend myself, guard my boundaries. Do I think all of that can just happen without working on it? In relationships that are dearest to me, again, I guess the problem comes from me and not others. I am invested in those relationships and so I’m the one who needs limits on my need to make them understand and agree with me. I guess in any close relationship, we seek to be understood, or to share our life with someone whose construction of reality is similar, who processes things in a similar way. The challenge is to grow together but not be stuck together: to share the journey of life and growing and becoming. Journal Entry We don’t live in isolation. We are connected. We aren’t defined by any one system (law, church, etc.), but move in and out of them, carrying parts of one into the other. People are more important than systems, yet people are all connected so can’t make a judgment of right or wrong in isolation—i.e., one person deciding what’s right and wrong. Journal Entry (This was months after the loss of our dog Mickey—see Part 02: Losing Mickey. A family needed to find a home for their year-old Golden Retriever and knew of our loss. They called us. As of this writing, Chance is still with us, 13 years old. These thoughts occurred during one of our many trips to the Gettysburg Battlefield for a few quiet hours together. ) Another thought today as I stood on the Battlefield with Chance in the sunshine: before when I looked at land, I wanted to possess it. Now I know that can’t be done. There’s a unity about creation that doesn’t permit possession. When we buy land and see it as our own, that’s our perception. But the boundaries aren’t real—they’re human construct. Given our sinfulness, I guess it’s the best way we have in order to live together. Now I don’t feel a need to buy land. If we do, it’ll be to have a place, to accept the construct because it’s what our laws are based on, but it won’t be real. It’ll no more be mine than anyone else’s. Journal Entry I think of the sacredness of life, how ‘life’, belonging to life, transcends my family, my congregation, my community, my country, even my humanity. And by saying transcend, I don’t mean being distant from. In fact, there is a connectedness that now makes seeing the sacred possible. Journal Entry God has taught me so much, and most of it painfully. I learn things the hard way, I really do. Perhaps the biggest blessing through all of this is this sense of compassion and oneness I’m beginning to feel with the rest of the world, especially people who suffer. It does bring more suffering to me because I’m more aware of how it is for them: their struggles and pain, the situations of their lives that are so against them. Journal Entry Where does this terrible grief come from? I can’t watch a newscast without crying. I feel an intense kinship with the world, and I want to reach out and embrace all the suffering and make it go away. What purpose does it serve? Why don’t those of us with more than enough do something to ease the suffering in the world? Okay, we do what we’re able. We drop money in the offering plate and give to special outreach events, but what about our lives really change? We give but it doesn’t require anything of us. We don’t hurt ourselves and limit our lifestyles in order to make a difference. And sometimes, I swear, we even secretly believe that people deserve what they get in life; that if they just worked harder, they could change their circumstances. We give, but suspiciously, wondering if we’re giving to the right (i.e., truly deserving) people. We say we want to help those who truly need it, and we do. It’s just that our view of who are the truly deserving seems to be rather narrow to me at times. I wonder, do gifts without compassion mean anything in the halls of heaven? Does giving to make ourselves feel better count? I’m feeling shallow somehow. Everything that motivates me to help, always comes back to me and how I feel about what I’m doing. Am I being a good Christian, am I doing what Christians are supposed to do—a duty? I know I care. I know compassion is interwoven with self-respect and the need to be a good person. It’s just really hard to sort it out. Journal Entry So I’m called to go on living in a world that exists in a greater oneness than I have heretofore suspected. It draws me into itself; God draws me in. There is pain in the exhilaration because in order to experience the oneness, I must let go of individual things, people, places. The world isn’t fair or unfair; it simply is: a created order that is so mysterious and so good, we can’t grasp it. We try to when we try to hang onto individual things, but they can’t replace the oneness we long for. God has created us for something so wonderful, it hurts. As I move away from owning—from possessing—I move closer to what really matters: people. But in a new way. I don’t own them, they don’t own me. I don’t need their approval, or even strangely enough, their love. That doesn’t mean it’s not important. We are called to love. Maybe I mean love the way we usually think of love. What all this does is strip me bare to serve. Love is something so much more fundamental than feeling. It’s being, and its source isn’t from the people who love us back. Love’s source is from God: it flows from God and finds lodging deeply within. It becomes part of who I am, not what I do, so that what I do speaks of this love/compassion. I think for the first time I understand Mother Theresa. I’ve admired her, but never pictured myself serving in such a self-giving way, or if I did, it was to escape the pressures around me (run off and be a missionary). Now I’m called to love the people in the church just like that. The love of God is never limited; it just is. It doesn’t serve itself; it brings the love and compassion of God to life in real life.
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