It occurs to me…

From Joan Chittister, Uncommon Gratitude:

“Be grateful and let it show.  What is due to others who seek the same liberty as ourselves?  Never imagine that anyone is dispensable. Keep the promises you have made and honour the promises of others in the world of human relations. Remember that the security you seek is what all want, and don’t set out to invade. Tell the truth about yourself and others. Don’t imagine that what makes someone else secure and happy is exactly what you need to make you secure and happy if only you could get it from them.”

This all seems like pretty good advice to me, but the one that stuck out in my mind was the “don’t imagine that what makes someone else secure and happy is exactly what you need to make you secure and happy.”  It occurs to me, however, that as problematic is a proclivity, one I have, to think that what makes me secure and happy is (using my keen sense of logic) just bound to be what makes every other sole in the universe secure and happy.  Because I view Fritos and bean dip as a comfort food, everyone (even those who don’t) must see it the same way.

“Consider the possibility that you might actually be lucky when you get rejected from stuff.  Because of this streak of what appeared to be bad luck, I fell into my life as it is today.”

Lisa Yuskavage

It is so hard to see, hard to understand, and even more difficult to have the patience to see this to be true, but experience tells me that dark clouds do have silver linings.  Or as Garth Brooks and Pat Alger wrote, “some of God’s greatest gifts, are unanswered prayers.”

From Summer Storm  by Dana Gioia:

Why does that evening’s memory

Return with this night’s storm –

A party twenty years ago,

Its disappointment warm?

 

There are so many might have beens,

What ifs that won’t stay buried,

Other cities, other jobs,

Strangers we might have married.

 

And memory insists on pining

For places it never went,

As if life would be happier

Just by being different.

I love those last two lines.  It occurs to me that much of life is, or can be, focused on that “as if” and not on what is, here, now — which can lead to a sort of nostalgia for things that never were.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to week and a time to laugh, a time to morn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.  Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

I can’t say I understand this passage, particularly the peace some people seem to find in it.  It seems to suggest that not only do I need to know what to do, but I need to know when to do it.  Not only do I need to make the right choice, but I need to make it at the right time.  At times like this I fall back on the timeless wisdom of Yogi Berra:  “You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run.  If you got timing, it’ll go.”  There, he has reduced the difficulty by half.

“When all else fails, you always have delusion.”  Conan O’Brien

Thank God for that —  though it occurs to me that my delusions seem so much more tolerable than the delusions of others.  If only others would have reasonable delusions like mine!

“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive….”  C. S. Lewis

Ah, forgiveness!  So readily received, and so reluctantly given.  Yet it is, as Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, a two-way street – a bumpy, difficult two way street (at least in that one “giving” lane), but a two-way street nonetheless.  While it is not an easy journey, Lewis provides at least some advice on how to travel a bit more easily in the “giving” lane: “Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember this is how He loves us.  Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves.  For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco….”

From Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Weber:

“[W]hat we celebrate in the saints is not their piety or perfection but the fact that we believe in a God who gets redemptive and holy things done in this world through, of all things, human beings, all of whom are flawed….  I keep making mistakes, even the same ones over and over.  I repeatedly attempt (and fail) to keep God and my fellow humans at arm’s length.  I say no when I should say yes.  I say yes when I should say no.  I stumble into holy moments not realizing where I am until they are over.  I love poorly, then accidentally say the right thing at the right moment without even realizing it, then forget what matters, then show tenderness when it’s needed, and then turn around and think of myself way too often….  I simply continue to be a person on whom God is at work.”

Flawed, of course, but that last line is the clincher.  “I simply continue to be a person on whom God is at work.”

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From the poem The Life of a Day by Tom Hennen:

“We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real.”

I read this and, once I got past the guilt of conviction, a couple of things came to mind.

A Don Williams song: “I got high hopes that tomorrow, is gonna be better than today.  I don’t look like its comin’, I know, buy why not believe it anyway.”

And Matthew 6:34: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

It is so easy to reject or set aside today in hopes of a better tomorrow, especially once you get to, say, 10:00 a.m..  It is easy at that point (sometimes earlier) to tell myself “no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for.”  But of course, today is the hand dealt today, and who knows what tomorrow’s hand will be, if it is dealt at all.  So, how do I play this hand?