Poverty of Excess Part 1 - The Good Life

Marla came to my practice recently, complaining of depression and anxiety that she simply could not explain. 

“My life is good!”, she reported. “I have everything a person could want. A good marriage. A home. A job. Financial security. Good health. Two well adjusted children. Annual family vacations….”

In her list, which follows the quintessential middle class North American script for living a “good” life, Marla was relaying to me that she had ticked all the boxes but still found life wanting. Even more impressively she had thus far escaped any significant tragedies that would wound or scar her life. 

So now, plagued by fears and sadness she could not explain, sleepless nights, difficulty leaving the house, and an abiding sense that she was headed towards losing her mind, Marla found herself overwhelmed, yet struggling to feel as if any of her suffering was legitimate.

 I’ve changed her name, but really, it could be any number of male of female patients from a variety of age groups and walks of life, that present for consultation with some similar version of a very similar set of problems. All of them in this particular boat describe themselves as unable to see why they should be suffering in this way without any sufficient reason to provide them with valid justification for needing attention from specialists. And it is precisely because of this apparently illegitimacy of their suffering that they struggle to be open with other people about their mounting psychological impairment. Most of them watch the news and observe the suffering taking place in other parts of the world, and wonder what it is that they have to be so sad about or afraid of. 

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that when symptoms emerge, it’s a sign that there’s something wrong with our selves. But sometimes environments can be the source of dis-ease…not every problem is internal in its origin. It can be tempting to blame biology and overlook the role our culture has in creating illness. In fact, I think there’s some financial interests pretty deeply invested in having us believe that chemical imbalances are all the explanation we need for mental illness. There’s an entire economy at stake in helping us avoid the confrontation with this question: “what if the ‘good life’ as it’s been presented to us, isn’t so ‘good’ after all?”

Is it possible that this overabundance is actually creating problems within us? Could it be that we still lack something even in the midst of all this wealth?

There is, another kind of poverty. It’s the poverty of excess. It’s a poverty that exists in the midst of the kind overabundance so common to many people in the developed world. With so many resources it’s very difficult to regard our lives as deprived of anything. But the poverty of excess is not one we can solve by simply acquiring more of something because it is our acquisition driven lifestyles that are actually creating the poverty in the first place.

As I noted in my post, “First World Problems”, it can sometimes feel invalid to complain about the kind of suffering experienced by those who live in the top 10% of world incomes (which is most people in North America). But ignoring the spiritual illness brought on by individualism, consumerism, and following the middle class “script” may actually perpetuate the behaviors that we engage in that result in the oppression of the developing world.

In the midst of our poverty of excess, it can be difficult to put our finger on exactly what we lack, because we appear to have so much, too much even. So what does a poverty of excess look like?

I realize this is too large a topic to cover in one blog post. But I want to start first by drawing our attention to the mere existence of the poverty of excess or overabundance. 

It’s been said that if you want to know what water is like, don’t ask a fish. It’s hard to see the poverty we swim in in our culture. Traveling and living elsewhere can help so greatly with this - like swimming in a different pond for a while to gain perspective on your natural habitat. For the longer you’re immersed, the more difficult it can be to describe what it is you’re immersed in. 

People like Marla are sometimes unaware that there even is a culture they’re immersed in, let alone begin to know how to describe it.  I’m not sure that I do either. But let’s try. Let’s begin by recognizing that in the water of our culture there are messages like, “you can never have enough or be enough”. Let’s start to open our minds to the counter-intuitive reality that excess, or overabundance doesn’t create a sense of sufficiency, but actually creates anxiety about deprivation and a vague sense of needing more. 

Maybe we can even learn to recognize how some of our emotional struggles emerge in a context where comfort and security are presented as normative, and suffering is regarded as a failure to live up to the culturally ordained plan for the good life. 

Anxiety Part X - Doesn't the Bible tell us not to be anxious?

There's some thinking and writing hanging around Christian circles these days on the topic of anxiety that I have significant concerns about. It would be easy to ignore if it wasn't being presented under the banner of a movement that refers to itself as "biblical counselling", which implies a sort of indisputable authority and truthfulness. But the work coming out of this school of thought is not just bad psychology, it's bad exegesis.

When looking to the bible for wisdom on anxiety the most frequently cited passages are: Philipians 4:6 ("...don't be anxious about anything...") and Matthew 6:25 ("...don't be anxious about your life, what you will wear or what you will eat...").

In both, the greek word being translated to "anxious" is merimna. This word has been translated to "anxiety" in these two passages but often translated to mean "worry" or  "care", as in 1 Peter 5:7 (..."cast all your cares upon him..."). But merimna really derives from the Greek merimnaō, which is about being separated from the whole. Some scholars suggest that this usage of the word is inferring a dividing and fracturing a person's being into parts. Perhaps a caring about something so much that it divides your soul rather than being a fully whole person. Interestingly, Jesus' words in the Matthew 6 passage are immediately following his teaching on not being able to serve two masters - that a house divided against itself can't stand.

It's a huge leap to assume that what Jesus or Paul, or the authors of the biblical texts meant by the word "anxious" was exactly the same as how we mean it today.

What do we mean exactly by the word "anxiety" today anyhow? This is another problem - we don't even have consistent or precise definitions of anxiety in our popular culture, or even in clinical usage. 

So before you go reading these passages and assuming God is against or displeased with your particular experience of anxiety, we need to slow down a little and admit to a lack of textual clarity.

Moreover, these passages in Phil 4 and Matt 6 are not the giving of commandments. Notice how when Jesus summarizes the law He says: "love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself"....he doesn't add, "and don't be anxious, either". Obviously not all passages of scripture are commandments, some are instructive but within a particular context. When Jesus tell this group not to be anxious about clothing or food, he's talking to a specific context, not necessarily laying down a universally applicable principle. 

The sad thing is, by throwing these verses at people, we've often made them feel like failures for having anxiety, as if to experience this part of humanity is to have sinned. 

John McArthur suggests exactly this in his book: Anxious for Nothing. McArthur comes to the conclusion that anxiety is simply a failure to trust God, no ifs, ands, or buts. If you're anxious, you're sinning, because you're telling God He isn't enough, isn't worthy of your trust, isn't really going to take care of you.

Perhaps this works for McArthur in dealing with his own life, but from where I sit, this is not only terrible theology, it's useless psychology. It only makes people feel worse and keeps them stuck in their anxiousness. Now they're not just anxious, they're also feeling like depraved failures who are spitting in God's face when they worry.

I'm going to avoid a long rant here about so-called "biblical counselling", but this is exactly the kind of dangerous and misguided "advice" that movement is producing. It's dangerous because it pretends to have the authority of the Scriptures to give bad and even damaging answers to people who are in mental anguish. Even worse, its advocates openly state that health care providers not under this banner are giving untrue and ungodly counsel. The largest Christian domination in the United States publicly supports and funds this approach.

But let's not forget, friends of so called "biblical counselling" that Jesus sweats drops of blood the night before He's crucified. A bizarre physiological reaction indeed - but for sure sweating when not exercising is a classic symptom of anxiety. He also calls out to his Father to spare Him from being crucified. This seems like avoidance to me, which as most people know, is associated with....anxiety.  He can't sleep. Well, insomnia does tend to hound the anxious. So if anxiety is a sin, you're going to have to tie yourself in some pretty tight theological knots to explain away how the sinless Son of God is visibly anxious the night before his death. 

And just because you read the bible and quote it doesn't mean you're teaching God's truth. Jesus makes it plenty clear to the Pharisees of his day that they have a perverse way of using the scriptures to impose an agenda on people and that very often they've completely missed the ways God works in the world. So let's get off our Christian high horses and approach this with some humility and honesty about the complex ambiguity of scripture, especially when it comes to many things psychological.

What if we were to accept that anxiety is a natural human experience? An emotion, accompanied by certain kinds of physiological manifestations and certain characteristic ways of thinking?

Remember how years ago the church used to teach that sexual desire was a bad thing? In more recent  years some people of faith kind of came to their senses and realized that sex is a gift, that the desire for it is also a gift, but that the real problem is how we relate to that gift, or what we do with it?

It's time for anxiety to get a similar sort of re-understanding. Anxiety is a gift. It keeps us safe. Unlike almost any other species on earth humans can think ahead and anticipate the terrible things that could happen and plan for how we might reduce the likelihood occurrence. We wear our seat belts in our cars because we have the capacity to be anxious about being mortally wounded in a collision. And if the building you worked in today didn't collapse in a heap of rubble, you can thank human anxiety. Someone else lost sleep trying to anticipate the loads the walls could safely hold up without having a string of collapsed buildings to prove what was safe. We have building codes that require structures to be built in a manner consistent with what our thinking ahead has taught us..."thanks anxiety!"...because we don't have to experience every tragedy before we can plan ahead to avert others. 

Really, when you get down to it, anxiety, as the human experience to anticipate negative outcomes and to be motivated to avoid them, is one of God's great gifts to us as a species. To call the gift of anxiety a sin is absurd. 

What's broken, is our relationship to anxiety, our way of interacting with it.

Which really shouldn't seem so strange when you think about it, because most of our sin is about broken ways of relating to God's creation. The way we relate to each other - broken. The way we treat natural life and our environments - broken. The way we relate to God - broken. The way relate to our sexuality, our vulnerability, power,....broken, broken, and broken. (The attempt to use the Bible as a literal textbook for counselling complex psychological phenomena - also broken by the way) Why should our relationship to anxiety be any different?

So if the sin in this situation is not anxiety but the way we relate to anxiety, what else might these biblical passages have to teach us?

If the greek marimnao is pointing to the kind of experience of anxiety that involves being divided from self, overtaken, preoccupied, or drawn off course, we might have a little better idea as to what kind of relationship we should be trying not to have with our anxiety. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety takes us away from ourselves: from being fully human and yet formed in the image of the Divine. It's the kind of relationship to anxiety that draws us away from being loving because we are allowing our fear to guide our decisions. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety is our master, and we answer to it. The kind of relationship in which the gift of anxiety, has actually become something that enslaves rather protects us and leads us to flourishing.

Jesus corrects the Pharisees when they criticize him for healing on the Sabbath. He reminds them that the Sabbath is gift designed to help humankind, and the humans were not made to serve the Sabbath or be enslaved by it observance. The same is true for anxiety. Anxiety has been gifted to us for our flourishing, not to be our master or run our lives.

Funerals for the living

Have you ever been stuck listening to a conversation that you just didn't want to hear? 

I was on a plane seated beside a young couple who were on their way home from their own spur of the moment wedding in Las Vegas. They spent the first hour picking apart the flaws in each other's families in an incredibly mean spirited and vulgar fashion, and at volume that made it all but impossible not to hear.  At some point they seemed to realize that I was sitting beside them and they interrupted me to ask what I was reading. I told them it was a biography of Steve Jobs (which drew puzzled looks on their faces). I explained that he was the founder of Apple, and likely was responsible for Mac's and iPods and changed the music industry....but was now dead. Their response was one of horror. Apparently my saying the word "dead" was completely disgusting to them. Recalling the taboo around the word "dead" in some cultures, I quickly recanted and told them he had "passed". Upon which, they were visibly relieved and returned to their gruesome dissection of the personal traits of each other's friends. (Who knew that elbows were even part of the way people evaluate others' worth as human beings?...but to some people they are crucial. ) 

It reminded me of how quickly death and dying can elicit responses of disgust and horror. 

Our phobia of death and mortality is so pervasive that defences like denial have become entrenched and habitual, to the point that we fail to give recognition to what has passed, what is lost, and how we suffer because of it.

I think most people in our culture struggle to grieve well. By which I mean, we generally struggle to effectively confront loss.

I'm on board with the idea that funeral's should be a celebration of a person's life, but not at the expense of also engaging the true reality of loss and all the sadness that entails. One of my few painful memories from childhood was being told by a relative that I shouldn't be sad when someone dear to me had died. Even as a six-year old I knew that I needed to feel the pain of losing someone important. The possibility of afterlife changes the meaning of loss, but it doesn't eliminate the sorrow of it entirely, and to pretend otherwise is a fool's errand. Many of us skirt the feelings of loss these days when someone dies by either avoiding the unpleasant rituals of death altogether, or trying to divert our attention by focusing only on the positive (hence my hesitation about being celebratory without acknowledging sorrow).

But this difficulty with grief doesn't just apply to actual death. It's a problem with loss in general.

We often fail to acknowledge the passing - the loss of things in our lives - especially when there's no body to bury.

Theologians like Arthur McGill, and psychologists like Rollo May, have suggested that we avoid confronting loss altogether in our culture because it reminds us of death, that perceived ultimate loss that inevitably awaits us. So we pretend that people can stay young. We offer products and services that create the illusions that time isn't lost or passing. We even desperately grasp on to nostalgia and recreations of our past to shield us from the truth that everything is in a constant state of change.

There are real consequences however when we fail to acknowledge loss. Perhaps most important of those consequences is the difficulty it creates in allowing us to live the life we have in the present. 

So I've taken to giving some advice to people that seems a little peculiar at first glance: have funerals for things and people that are gone, even if they're still technically alive.

Sometimes people have changed so much they have become a totally different person than you used to know, and show no signs of going back. And this hurts. It hurts that they will never again play that role in your life, that they will never be the same person to you that they were. And like all loss, the more loving and important they were to you in the past, the deeper the hurt when they've become this new person who doesn't even resemble the one you knew. 

It's a loss and it needs to be grieved. You don't get to go to the funeral home and look at a made up body in a casket.  But you can bring in some elements of ritual that help you say goodbye and move through the grieving process. 

Write a eulogy. Identify all the dearest memories, all the funny stories, all the things that person meant to you. Read it out loud to friends at a pub, or write it on index cards with crayon while sitting in your bathtub and listening to music they loved. It doesn't really matter the format as long as you're clearly seeing and naming what was, and acknowledging that it has passed. 

Some of us need to have funerals for ourselves.

In a life permanently altered by an accident or medical condition, or even just the slow process of deterioration that comes with aging, we are changed so significantly that a part of us is gone. Very often our identities are tied up in what we "do" in our physical capabilities and activities. Is it any wonder then that an illness or disabling condition can feel remarkably like a part of our selves has died? This too is a loss we must grieve. The loss of self, even while we are alive is painful and disorienting. And if you need to have a funeral, go ahead. Wear black, bury something, make a poster-board of memories of what has passed. Honour your loss. Don't try to make it a good thing too quickly. Many of us have been lead to under appreciate the value and importance of negative emotions, thinking that we should quickly find a happier note to sing lest we fall into wallowing. A funeral can be a good place to find permission to be sad and cry. 

At the heart of all grief is the uniquely human emotion of bittersweet. We who are made in the image of the Divine have this capacity to feel both sorrow and joy at the same time. Joy for what was, and for what the person or thing meant to us. But also sorrow. Sorrow for the fact that it is now gone and can never be exactly replaced. Remember, that its irreplaceable quality is precisely what made it so precious and special while it was present. 

Loss is an ongoing part of our lives as they were in the past. Ignoring loss steals the present from us as well. 

On one hand I'm tempted to be critical of the couple that sat next to me on the plane for covering up the reality of death with a more sanitized word like "passed" to avoid facing the fear and pain associated with loss.

On the other hand, I think the word "passed" has it's own value for marking the constant flow of loss that happens in all of our lives. There will never be a day exactly like today. Friends I love are getting older and closer to illness. My kids are growing up. Opportunities to show love are vanishing as quickly as they appear. 

Today is passing. 

All of life around us is passing as we journey forward. It makes every moment precious. It means constant losses. 

I'm not writing this piece with any one person in mind. All of you who read this blog are on journey's of loss because you are human.

So may you discover the quintessentially bittersweet quality of human life in all of its fullness by acknowledging and honouring your losses. Even if it means having a small funeral for something that's alive but changed... and eating some triangle sandwiches in a church basement afterward. 

War in my head...

Tonight I left to go to work with a lot of anxiety. It was nothing to do with work itself, it was a deep sense of dread that nothing matters in life. It's hard to believe I could walk out the door from a wife and daughters I adore and cherish and still even question life's meaning. But I'm a complicated guy and my intellect and my work as a psychologist have led me to some dark spaces. I have a strong theology of suffering, but the hellish thing I heard this week...well...it reminds me of all the other torture stories I've heard in the past 10 years, and it sucks me into those powerful questions I have about human life being anything more a terrible mistake of evolution. Consciousness allows us to do some amazing things, but it's also an enormous burden.

And at the risk of sounding like I'm coming unglued, I think I heard a voice tonight.

I had a patient cancel at the last minute, and in the mean time I decided to confront my angst with silence.

In the silence I heard that voice I've so rarely heard - probably because I'm such a terrible fucking skeptic.

Oddly, it was a voice that reminded me of something my friend wrote about church.

My friend said that a church is a group of people trying together to learn to have their hearts beat like God's beats. That we learn the rhythm of God's heart, and try to have our hearts beat in time with His.

Beautiful.

If the spiritual metaphor is too vague, what I'm saying is that I think we have to learn to love the things that God loves, in the ways that God loves. That life's meaning is to be found in emulating Jesus...not by being religious...but by loving in those radical ways that overcome darkness and torture and death. We defy the horror of this life and that sick empty feeling that chases a lot of us whenever we slow down, by choosing to love extravagantly.

And as I tear myself away from my own internal battle long enough to realize that I am not the sole decision maker about whether my life is ultimately meaningful or worthwhile,  I'm captivated by the thought that those whom I'm bound to in life - my family, my community, the patients I serve, the God that I wrestle with - also have something to say about whether or not my life is meaningful. It makes me realize that I need other people - that any question about existence is not for me to work out as a private intellectual enterprise - but can only be resolved in the context of who I am in relationship to others. And hesitantly I acknowledge that for me this must include others who believe and doubt this story of Jesus.

But I have a lot bad feelings and thoughts about church. These days fewer of those thoughts are judgemental angry ones, and most are just despair because I can't find an enduring or satisfactory answers about who we are to be as a church.

Yet maybe it really is so simple (not easy, but simple) as learning to pattern our own hearts after God's, and learning to do this together in the context of community. As much as I struggle with Christians, I need them. I need to have them in my life to learn how to love...and they need me...with all my selfish, critical, over-thinking, brokenness. They aren't just the blue section on my Google calendar, they are a part in God's invitation for me to learn how love as God loves. They are God's invitation to a life saturated in meaningfulness, redemption, and hope.

The Storms >CAN< Save Us

Usually we fear storms...not just the weather event kind of storms, but those painful, destructive, chaotic, overwhelming times in our lives when, as an old hymn writer put it, "sorrows like sea-billows roll".

A friend of mine reminded me the other day about a peculiar thing that happens in the story of Jonah: Jonah tries to run from God, but on his sea voyage is thrown overboard into the stormy sea so that other sailors won't drown too, and is swallowed by a great fish. In the belly of this fish (whale?) he calls out to God - but not for help! Instead he quotes Psalms of thanksgiving.

Now maybe I'm wrong, but this seems an unusual reaction for a human, in the face of grave danger, to be thankful. I remember as a kid someone tried to reconcile this for me by telling me Jonah thought the fish was going to save him from drowning....but I don't really buy this anymore....I think in the belly of a fish you pretty much assume you've found one path to death that just smells worse than drowning. Granted, it's probably true that Jonah is more of a parable than a historical account (like Job), where the truth of what it means is more the point, rather than the plausibility of the story details. Whether or not we accept the physics of being swallowed by a fish doesn't so much matter - the story is true in what it teaches us about life and God, and in this case storms and suffering.

Some of you know that I help people whose lives have been devastated by car accidents, workplace injuries, and the like. My office is full of human tragedy and often folks come to me in the midst of the worst storms of their lives. Now that I have a few years behind me of doing this work, and I've learned to look at my own life differently, I've come to observe an interesting pattern...

....the storms can save us.

Even when we think they are bringing our destruction and we need to be rescued from them, it is often the storm that is rescuing us from something.

Like the three people I've seen in two years that had car accidents, which led to MRI's, which in turn led to the perfectly timed discovery of previously undiagnosed tumors that were removed and spared their lives for many years afterward.

Or the folks I've seen that tell me they never lived for anything important until they lost all of the unimportant things in an accident.

Or the second-career people who thought that being downsized was the end of the world, until they discovered their old job wasn't actually good for them or their family.

Or the competent professional who found that being vulnerable and relying on others for help after a family tragedy brought new friendships he could never have imagined.

Or the marriages that were never truly intimate until one partner had to learn to depend on the other because their body wouldn't permit radical independence anymore.

The storms can save us. They often do. We may not see what they are or what they have saved us from, but so long as we remain open to being changed and taught and transformed, the storms can take us from a hell we may not have imagined or seen.

So, perhaps Jonah gives thanks when he realizes that he cannot run from the presence of God. That even in the belly of a fish, he cannot flee. Perhaps he recognizes that the storm has saved him, and that's why he doesn't call out for help to be rescued. Maybe he sees that running from God can bring a life worse than death.

Now I appreciate the objections this will raise. I specifically am saying that storms "can" save us, because I don't want to ascribe all human suffering to being an intentional act of God to fix people. I think suffering is fundamentally a mystery, and I don't have the hubris to write a blog post that claims to resolve it. And I also realize that telling people in the midst of a storm that what they're going through could save them....isn't very helpful. Storms are painful and destructive, and our biology predisposes us to pursue perceived safety. But it does seem that at the right time we humans can look at our dark times in life and find something meaningful, helpful, and even life saving.

And maybe part of growing is learning to trust that not all storms are something to be saved from or avoided, but that storms can save us, even when we think running is the safest thing to do.

Do we ever learn?

A patient of mine was lamenting his tendency to go backwards in life - to do what he knows better than to do. We talked about the human frailty - our tendency to learn things, to make changes, but then to fall back on old habits, old ways, old thoughts and beliefs.

It is indeed part of our tragic nature - a flaw we all share - that we often know better than what we do. We learn, we change, but often only partially.

As we talked, I wondered aloud what our next reaction to this situation might be. I mean, obviously we experience frustration about "knowing better", but what comes after that....is it despair? Or, is there another reaction we can choose after we allow ourselves that moment of initial frustration about being fully human and not changing fully in the way we would wish? Despair is so tempting, so easy when we don't know what else to think or feel.

This morning I offer this: that after the frustration of chronic human failure to change, we can choose to react with hope.

Hope. Not blind optimism or trying to insert a positive thought we don't actually believe, but hope.

Hope that in spite of our failure to change fully, we have at least begun to change. We are capable of some change, of starting a process in which change is happening even if it is not complete. Hope that our incomplete changes are in and of themselves meaningful and good. I may not have stopped being selfish, but the times I choose not to be are good - good for me, for my family, for my patients, and maybe for the world. I want more of those good choices not to be selfish, and hope propels me forward to continue to work at choosing well. Despair blurs my judgement and tells me that failure to perform at the level I expect means I should give up. I causes me to lose sight of the good that has come from the changes I have made. We are works in progress, and to lapse or step backwards is not the same as to undo all of the progress we have made. In this case hope is not closing one's eyes to the truth to escape a bitter reality, but rather seeing things for how they really are, and being more engaged with life as a result.

There is another source of hope. A hope that our progress someday will reach completion, that this cosmic drama we live in is headed in a direction that eventually resolves with a full reconciliation and restoration of all creation. I grew up with the notion that all that had to happen was for me to a) believe the right things, and b) die and go to heaven where everything would be fixed up for me. Later in life I've come to realize that the work of refinement, redemption, and reconciliation are in progress now, here, on the earth, and that God seems to will that we partner with God in this work in the present, rather than waiting for a magic transformation to happen after we die. I'm not attacking the idea that a final perfection might take place, just the opposite, I think the work of change is completed in a mysterious way in the future. I think perhaps we do eventually "learn" fully, in some transition that takes place beyond our mortal bodies. But for now, we are to engage in starting the process. Showing patience with ourselves for not being at the end point, and choosing hope rather than despair for our "work in progress" that someday, through the mysterious work of the Divine will be completed.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.  1 Cor 13:12

Despair is a Choice

Despair is a choice.

It doesn't feel like it in the moment. When you feel like you've be stepped on, crushed, beaten down, or that "last straw" has been snapped, it's the most easy and natural thing to give in to despair.

It presents itself so logically, "why bother trying if all life ends up bringing you is pain and disappointment".

It feels so real and absolute. The emotion is often accompanied by a profound heaviness, sometimes in the form of body sensations that mimic the real experience of being crushed.

But like all of our feelings we have have a choice. We may not choose our initial reactions, but we can learn to choose how we react to our reactions - that is, how we continue to think, and feel, and behave in response to those initial reactions.

To despair is to take on a myopic view of the world. It's as if an electromagnet has been switched on and attracted all the past and present disappointments and failures and darkness in the world. And with all the reminders of those disappointments and failures comes a clear message "don't fight anymore...don't try anymore....it's not worth it... things never turn out right".

To be hopeful in the midst of despair seems unnatural. It is an act of faith. Faith in the sense of believing an unseen reality - of believing that our despair is not how things really are in the world. In a sense it requires us to think and behave as if there were still reason to be hopeful....and letting the feeling change later on.

It's come to me today that hope is something we must practice, more than it is a passing sense of optimism, or something that transpires after a moment of insight. To be hopeful requires a regular work-out of emotional and spiritual muscles that refuse to get stuck in the limited perspective that despair traps us in. It requires us to keep our minds dwelling in the broadest, truest realities of the universe. The realities that affirm that all things are being recreated, redeemed, made new, and restored. That God will not be thwarted in his love and reconciliation. We can see evidence of these realities if we are persistent in choosing to focus our attention on them, and not choose to allow despair to take up residence in our minds.

For me, today is a hard day to practice this. I must make regular, conscious decisions to fight despair and choose hope instead.

Merton on Suffering

Sometimes blogging feels more like bringing wisdom written long-ago to the attention of others, rather than coming up with anything new.

I had been kicking around some ideas for a post on the avoidance of suffering and the pain it causes when I came across this from Thomas Merton. He just captures it perfectly:

  "Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 91

Tortured by little and trivial things...how convicting.

Fear of being hurt...I realize this truth from time to time, and then I lose it again.

When I was sitting at my father's bedside in ICU and expecting him to die soon, a friend reminded me by text (see, even texting can be redeemed) not to run from my suffering, but to gently sit with it. Not to allow my fear of being hurt to chase me away, but to allow my mind and heart to be fully present in that dark moment. It was great advice. I wish I could remember to do it in the daily moments and not just the big, scary times of life.