It occurs to me…

“Happy events make life delightful, but they do not lead to self-discovery and growth and freedom….  Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation.”  Anthony DeMello.

I so want to argue with that but am hard-pressed to do so.  It occurs to me that perhaps this is why, in sports, it is so difficult for a team to repeat as a champion.  The winners are left with the delight of winning, and it is easy for the work that got them there to slip from their memory.  It may be natural to start believing your own “pub” and lose some of what got you there.  Who knows?  But note DeMello writes that painful events contain “a seed of growth and liberation,” a seed only.  In this I am reminded of the Danish proverb (though it sounds very German to me): “God gives every bird its food, but does not throw it into the nest”

Those seeds sown by adversity require recognition, and it is easy to overlook them whilst fretting over the adversity.  And once recognized, they require some care and effort for growth to occur.

What seeds has this adversity cast along my path, and what will I do with them?

Running today, I listened to an On Being podcast, Falling Together, in which Krista Tippett interviewed Rebecca Solnit.  It was recorded some time back but played again this week because of the appropriateness of the topic – how we maintain hope in adversity.  If you are so inclined, here is the link to the hour-long interview – what else do you have to do???

 https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/

This from Solnit talking about the difficulty to have hope when change is slow:

“Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart.  Sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the universe [which he sermonized “is long, but always bends toward justice”] is too long for you to see its curve.  Sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward, to study the line of that arc.”

I like this thought that sometimes hope is gathered by looking back, not by looking forward.  It makes sense, of course, because my ability to predict/understand the past is WAY better than my ability to predict/understand the future.  Yet in this “what have you done for me lately” world, hope seems to be understood as exclusively forward looking.  We look forward for hope, and if we can’t see any in the next _____ [fill in your personal temporal tolerance amount] then we despair, even wallow.  And in the midst of this Covid 19 pandemic, anyone taking in the news and internet chatter can find it easy to despair, easy to wallow.  I’m all in for hand washing and social isolation, but perhaps I should give up trying to become an epidemiologist and figure this pandemic out in my spare time and instead look backward a bit and think of those instances when, against all logic and reason, over time, it (whatever “it” was then) somehow worked out.  And if that seems to difficult, then perhaps reading Luke 21-25 will do the trick.

Anxiety – concern related to something that might occur in the future, might not, hasn’t yet.

Regret – concern related to something that has occurred in the past.

Life – all that occurs between anxiety and regret.

Live life.

Not anxiety.

Not regret.

Photo taken of the roofline of my house, converted to a pencil sketch.  Text is derived from Psalm 46:10.

Today’s quote is from the well-known philosopher, Boy George:

“If you have to be in a soap opera, try not to get the worst role.

I am no soap opera aficionado but have seen enough to know that each soap opera has that character, the one character that stirs the pot and seems to be at the center of all the conflict.  The point is we don’t want to be THAT character in the soap opera of life – though it seems as if some have studied well for that part.  Still, “try not to get the worst role” is good advice.

As often occurs, today stirs a reflection from The Shawshank Redemption, Andy speaking to Red:

“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

And that always leads me to this from Vaclav Haval, lest hope be turned into some magic potion:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

Well, I can’t say that how it turns out always makes sense to me, but then that is, I guess, where hope does its thing.

A song cannot, of course, cure a virus any more than it can reverse a downward spiraling stock market, yet this song seems to have the knack of showing up in my head when most needed – of course, is there ever a time it is not needed:

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say

It is well, it is well with my soul.”

Courtyard

As I sit quietly at the desk in my hotel room and look out the window, watching light replace darkness in the courtyard, as I contemplate the choice of French’s yellow mustard window trim against the white and gray outside walls, God suddenly makes sense.

I can’t explain that any more than I can explain what love is; any more that I can explain right and wrong; any more than I can explain why, at some point, buying pants with the previously scorned expandable waistline makes sense, or how evangelical Christians continue to support Trump.

Still, at this blessed moment, God makes sense.

And surprisingly, the yellow trim works.

“I believe that love is the greatest and hardest work.”  Brian Doyle

A simple statement that, when examined, turns infinitely complex, mainly due to the three words – “great,” “hard,” and “work.”  The first might make it on an understated Valentine’s card, but the last two never would.  Still, love is, at any given time, each or some combination of all three.

Photo taken at the Houston Museum of Art some years back.