considering pain

In many faith traditions (not all) the word “sin” is couple in some way with pain. Cain was in pain over the favor shown to his brother Abel and committed murder (sin). Peter was afraid of pain that would follow his acknowledgement of his teacher Jesus and denied this relationship (sin). There are many more examples in the Judeo and Christian traditions. As I understand the Buddhist tradition on pain there is a different perspective. [I am only beginning to learn what treasures can be uncovered in this ancient philosophy.] Pain is part of life and the key is to not be captive to the suffering induced by pain. Sin in the Buddhist tradition either doesn’t exist or has something to do with ignorance. [There are some good blogs on this topic at Buddhism.about.com] In the Islamic tradition sin is about defying or ignoring the will of Allah. Pain is a means of strengthening one’s faith in this tradition. (beliefnet.com, blog by Ellen Leventry, “Why bad thing happen”)

“Sin” is a word, a label. I would rather talk about the pain we experience in our lives. Pain—physical, psychic, emotional, mental, relational, spiritual—is a reality. It’s something we experience in life. To put the label sin on any of these experiences of life diminishes the impact of the experience in my way of thinking. Pain can take many forms from anguish to restlessness, fear to anxiety to distraction. There are many shadings to pain and the common denominator is that all pain can cripple us. It vies for supremacy in our mental functioning. Mental clarity and acuity is as available to us as our deepest fear. That is, the stronger our fear the less clear we can think about reality and action. Our pain and fear and anxiety can even lull us into thinking that we are seeing things clearly from behind the veil of pain and our actions and decisions become responsive to a skewed perspective.

So how do we work with pain? How do we get out from under its grip to a different reality? Athletes are often told to “push through” their pain. I believe this means that they are to ignore the pain and just keep moving, doing whatever exercise they are engaged in. This doesn’t mean the pain goes away. It means that they don’t give priority to it in their mind. They think about other things—the routines they have learned and practiced repeatedly or imagine themselves at the finish line, etc.

On the other hand, counselors will subscribe to the prescription of naming our pain so as to lessen its power over our actions and decisions. The theory and experience is that naming the source or origin of our pain, acknowledging its existence, gives us choices that do not exist if we merely react to the presence of our pain.

This search for employment that I am experiencing brings pain in the form of fear and anxiety. I fear not being able to work again because I am aging out of the market. I have anxieties that I am not doing enough to find work and that the meaning of my life will be lost. So I use both practices for dealing with my pain. I push through my fears each day to find things I can do and to look for signs of hope and meaning. I name my anxieties here and with friends and listen to their feedback. I work at discriminating what words and thoughts from others are life giving and which as life stifling. And I try to give priority to the life-giving words. I name the life giving ones out loud to others with the hope that they might be infused with life as well.

I think that probably both methods of dealing with pain can be put to good use in lessening pain’s power. Whatever tact you take to lessen the power of pain in your experience, know that sometimes pain can lead us to a window when doors are closed. Pain can and will serve a purpose, can and will serve life if we acknowledge it and work with it.

heroes

I’m thinking of heroes. Not the heroes of popular culture or history. I’m thinking of the heroes of my life—the people who have inspired me to live hopefully and courageously even when the chips are down. The heroic qualities of these people are often hidden from the general public. And yet their lives and stories have the power to inspire and empower others. They may never know that they have given others the courage and inspiration to live lives of purpose and meaning. They have often been called “unsung heroes”. Unsung that is, until we speak their names and stories.

So I am speaking today of the inspiration I have received from my father who died too young and lived unfulfilled dream, who stood by a wife with emotional issues and raised two daughters to adulthood. His work was that of a time gone by. He was a tailor as was his father before him. He was also a member of what Tom Brokaw calls “the great generation”. He left his apprenticeship to his father to fight in WWII. There was no time to finish the many year course of a master trade with apprenticeship and journeyman to become a master tailor when he returned from the war. There was no time because my grandfather, Dad’s dad, died shortly after my father returned. I’m sure there was a period of sowing some oats instead of sewing coats immediately after the life threatening and altering experience, but by the time he settled down in married life and I was born my grandfather had succumbed to cancer. The master was gone. My father tried to make a go of made-to-measure tailoring, but we lived in the midwest in the midst of farm country. Needless to say there was very little call for tailor made clothing. My father often felt like a failure because he couldn’t make a living at tailoring as his father had. He regretted that he had not learned all he could from his father like how to make patterns. He did make me some coats and helped when sewing frustrated me as a teenager. Eventually he found a master tailor in a neighboring city and completed his apprenticeship. By the time this was done even wealthier people passed by tailor made clothing for the efficiency of mass produced, ever available clothes off the rack. My dad tailored for a large department store making alterations to ready-made clothing sold in the store until he too succumbed to cancer at age 63.

Today would have been my dad’s birthday. I’ve often wished he could have seen the bigger picture enough to understand that it was not his inadequacy as a tailor so much as a change in the culture and market that diminished almost all trades and crafts, including tailoring, in our society. This hero of mine fought valiantly to hold onto a craft that has become obsolete. To sit for hours and learn the feel of the needle and thread, to train one’s eye and touch to understand the weave and drape of material, this is art of a different age and time. But heroes can be like that. They not so much champion lost causes as they stand for the undervalued qualities that make life and work more a product of the best human effort.

So here’s to you, Dad, for offering your best effort to support your family and believing that work could and should feed the soul.

life cycle & fallow times

The return of the sun is nourishing my soul. I am fortunate enough to have a place in my home when the sun steams in and I can sit her soaking myself in vitamin D and warmth. Nature is another tool of the spirit for me It’s a source of wonderment and mystery. I have always felt quieter inside when I am immersed in nature.

As a child one of my favorite places to play was a college arboretum a short walk from my home. There was a pond that froze in the winter and I learned to ice skate there. There were stone gazebos built among the trees and bushes where I would pretend to be a princess and my fantasies would take flight. There were paths weaving in and out of shadows where I was always surprised by the discovery of a flower or turtle when I turned the corner. There was a graceful old weeping willow at the water’s edge where I would sit and dream of a wonderful future. I found hope in my arboretum.

It’s the constancy of the life cycle in nature that I turn to now for inspiration about my own future. The cycle from dormancy to renewal, to bloom and flower only to wilt and die to outward appearances while in secret life indulges in regeneration. Our human lives require these fallow periods to regenerate and re-create and re-establish outward living. Work is outward living. Though circumstances in the public world may present us with a fallow period tending to our inner gardens just might be the best use of this time.
How does nature impact your spirit? Where is your green place? What have you benefitted from during fallow periods in your life?

on becoming me

It's hard to know who I am as a non-working person.  I've let my work define me for most of my life.  This is a spiritual challenge now--to be who I am without an institution or career defining me.  I have visions of the rest of my life whithering as I wonder where the person I was went.  And yet I am beginning to recognize that I was not fully realized in what I was doing.  To work and survive in an institution or business everyone has to engage in tasks that aren't a good fit and try to master new skills as the work requires.  I think bosses think of this as loyalty. At times this "stepping up to the opportunity" is energizing, at times distressing.  It challenges the worker to "upgrade" her/himself continually and at a continually rapid pace. I wonder though what it does to our spirits. Now I hear that as the economy shrinks and the unemployed rate grows workers who still have jobs are required to pick up more and more work of colleagues who were formerly working beside them.  Are we at such a state that to work is to be unhappily over-worked and/or anxiously grateful that you have a job, such as it is?  What happened to fulfillment and satisfaction in the workplace?

Being underemployed is giving me a opportunity to allow my values to guide my decisions and identity.  At times I am tempted to send my resume for a position that doesn't quite or at all fit my sense of myself.  I do it because of thoughts like, "It will be good practice if I get an interview" or "Maybe I can find a way to define this job as my own."  Neither of these thoughts gets me past the online application.  I am getting all kinds of email advise from the online sites where I have gone to search for position openings.  Frankly, this advise makes me feel worse because it's proposes the formulaic advise that really doesn't seem to take into account my specialty, chaplaincy.  One such emailer advised that I use fewer passive verbs such as "provided" and instead list my accomplishments.  I'm sure most employers would be impressed if I wrote in my resume that I "saved 100 souls last year" and "laid hands on and healed 20 people each month."  The trouble is I am not applying for televangelist of the year. 

I think that I shall let my values and passions be my guides.  They communicate pretty clearly who I am and the gifts I bring to the table.  I think I'll also try to cultivate some patience for the employer who will recognize and apprecisate those gifts.  In the mean times without my institutional constrictions to bind me maybe I'll discover more gifts and values of the "I AM" that I am becoming.   

Presence

The sky is a white-grey and the air is moist with cold.  It's trying to be spring outside and I sit in the sunroom where in past weeks I have been nourished and warmed by the shining sun.  Last week I worked a couple days and now I sit here wondering and waiting, "When will I work again?"  I was encouraged and felt alive working at the ministry I love--chaplaincy--last week.  I was seeing patients and families in hospitals and celebrated the feeling that I awoke the possibilities of connection and hope in the rooms I visited.  Of course every visit doesn't contain this kind of celebration.  There are the time when all I can do is sit with a family member whose loved one is seriously ill or just died and sync my breathing with theirs.  There are no words or few words.  Presence is the only message. 

It is hard to quantify this work and some people do not want to justify it as work because there is no identifiable product.  And yet I know and have experienced and know others have experienced the change that Presence elicits.  People move to a different place and space when they know they are not alone, they are connected to something larger than themselves.  They can find within themselves a courage, a purpose, a calm, whatever it is that they need in the moment when they are reminded of Presence. 

PRESNCE

I toast Presence.

"Now that seems trite!"

When as hard and harsh

life is

to raise a glass in toast

seems almost to miss 

the point.

The point

to be present to Presence

who accompanies us

to the depths of despair,

to the shores of sorrow,

to the ruins of remorse,

to the waves of worry

and back out again.

So "Here's to you, Presence!

Come woo me back to life."

You may not or you may know Presence.  I give my allegiance to the affirmation that Presence of the Universe is the matrix in which we live and move and have our being.  There isn't a thing we can do or be that doesn't have an impact on the universe in which we live and die.  That gives perspective to this time in my life when feelings of worth are hard to come by.  It makes the times between outward productivity times of thriving not just surviving. 

Hear you here next time.... 

staying salty

It has been six months since I last had full time employment and my spirit sags as I work on my taxes.  Of course my spirit would sag just working on my taxes, but this year it serves to as salt in the wound.  What does that scripture say?  That we are salt of the earth?  That we shouldn't lose our saltiness?  I don't feel to salty some days if I think of salt as an irritant in the wound.  I'm trying to focus instead on the healing powers of salt.  Did you ever gargle with salt to heal a kanker sore?  I'm trying to focus on salt as a universal equalizer making salty people those who share values and exercise common sense, as in "salt of the earth".  Like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile un/underemployment is causing a syzemic shift in the ground beneath us and values are being tossed about and buried under the rubble of lives that we built with faith in our economic structures and systems.  The upheavel has levened us; we share a humbleness in our un/uneremployment whether we were executives, construction workers, teachers, whilte- or blue-collar workers.  The trouble, I think, is that we keep looking outside ourselves for the resources that are life giving.  Sure we need a shelter over our heads, food in our bellies and water to quench our thirst.  Those are things that sustain life.  We also need that multi-purpose saltiness to keep us from giving up on life, to keep us restructuring our value systems when they crumble, to keep us looking for our true and autherntic voice and then using it to create more life.  I know that a word of approval from my husband, an affirmation of my gifts from a colleague, an open door welcoming the things I volunteer helps me maintain my saltiness.  What does it for you?  How can you stay salty?