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Our
culture, of course, is overloaded with data. It’s wanting
in meaning. It tempts us to indifference and unhealthy detachment.
We don’t really want to pursue even our evil thoughts
or our good thoughts to find out where they could lead. We
get shortchanged. The ancient monks spoke of the temptation
of … indifference, not caring, as being tempted to look
outside of one’s cell to see if the other monks were
up to anything. Our modern day equivalent may be turning on
CNN. But the temptation is the same. And the result is also
the same, not caring, indifference. The holy realist is aware
of this and knows all too well that temptation to indifference,
but he or she resists, asserting that life does have meaning,
life is worth caring about, and how we live it matters. ...
Holy
realism knows that life is worth living in any season. It counters
that silly T-shirt I sometimes see: “Life is a bitch
and then you die.” Holy realism knows that life is both
gift and struggle, and then we die, each one of us. And we
can’t begin to imagine the good things that God has in
store for us then.
--Kathleen Norris
Being
real about darkness and struggle
When my niece Christina was a toddler, her mother worked as a stockbroker and
financial planner. My brother, Christina’s father, would drive her to
day care in the morning and her mother would pick her up after work. And every
day she brought Christina an orange, peeled so that the child could eat it
on the way home. One day Christina was busying herself by playing Mommy’s
office on the front porch … of our house in Honolulu. And I asked her
what her mother did at work. Without hesitation and with a conviction that
I relish to this day, she looked up at me and said, “She makes oranges.”
And
that is what God does, I think, making oranges and wind and
the ocean and green leaves and everything else that constitutes
our earthly home. As we come to know this God who gives us
so much, a God of limitless compassion, we can find great mercy
even in the midst of lamentation. And … that marvelous
phrase that ‘the world is new every morning,’ that
comes in the middle of a lamentation. It comes after great
lament, in fact.
--Kathleen Norris
Most
of us arrive at a sense of self … only after a long journey
through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance
to the trouble-free “travel packages” sold by the
tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition
of pilgrimage--“a transformative journey to a scared
center” full of hardship, darkness and peril.
In
the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as
accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous
terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost --challenges
of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego
of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for the
true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better
chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused
of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one
day to find that the sacred center is here and now--in every
moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and
deep in our hearts.
But
before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel
in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story-- every
pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy--but it is the
part of the story left untold. When we escape the darkness
and stumble into light, it is tempting to tell others that
our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights that we spent
cowering in fear.
The
experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into
selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me stay
in the light. But I want to tell the truth as well: many young
people today journey in the dark, as the young always have,
and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy
parts of our lives. When I was young, there were few elders
who were willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended
that success was all that they had known. As the darkness began
to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought that I had
developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not
realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining
the human race.
--Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, (Somerset,
NJ: Jossey-Bass, 1999) 17-19.
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