Ten Commandments for Mature Living  … #4

“Let suffering soften your heart rather than harden your soul.”

‘Suffering and humiliation will find us all, and in full measure, but how we respond to them will determine both the level of our maturity and what kind of person we are going to be. Suffering and humiliation will either soften our hearts or harden our souls.”

“There is no depth without suffering”,  writes Rolheiser. “It can make us deep in understanding, empathy, and forgiveness, or it can make us deep in resentment, bitterness and vengeance…. And we have to make that choice daily: every time we find ourselves shamed, ignored, taken for granted, belittled, unjustly attacked, abused,or slandered we stand between resentment and forgiveness, bitterness and love. Which of these we choose will determine both our maturity and our happiness.”

I don’t think I can add anything to that … except to pray that the Spirit of God in us will give us this grace to choose well.

Ten Commandments for Mature Living #3

Transform jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred, rather than give them back in kind.

“Any pain or tension that we do not transform we will transmit.”

Jesus “took in hatred, held it, transformed it and gave back love; he took in bitterness, held it, transformed it, and gave back graciousness; he took in curses, held them, transformed them, and gave back blessings; and he took in murder, held it, transformed it, and gave back forgiveness.”

Just think about that one for a while: whatever we do not transform we will transmit.

Carrying Life’s Complexities

Ten Commandments for Mature Living #2

This weekend I went to a party. It was a celebration that took place in the midst of a very difficult and painful circumstance. There were old friends, loving children and grandchildren, good food and wine, laughter, and poetry to celebrate the guest of honor. That is, some of the very best things in life. It was a celebration in the midst of a sorrow - or maybe a sorrow in the midst of a celebration.

I also (against my better judgement, as such movies generally make me crazy) watched a “Christian” movie. And yes, it did make me crazy, until we began to think of it as a mockumentary … a Christopher Guest movie about Christians, sort of “Waiting for Guffman” meets “Spinal Tap.”  And then we roared with laughter and guessed everything that would happen next (down to the dead guy’s cell phone message… and now you know what the movie was.)

The thing I hated of course is that it was so predictably “Jesus fixes everything.” Unambiguous. Happy endings. (Even for the dead guy who miraculously had a deathbed … or rather deathstreet) conversion.

Real life is more ambiguous - more like the sorrow in the midst of the party. I believe that because of Jesus, the party is the lasting thing, and the sorrow the fleeting. But until then, there is tension. Hence, this week’s invitation:

Be willing to carry more and more of life’s complexities with empathy.

Few things in life, including our own hearts, are black and white, either/or, simply good or simply bad. Maturity invites us to see, understand and accept this complexity with empathy, so that, like Jesus, we cry tears of understanding over our own troubled cities and our own complex hearts, and like Jesus, too, we can forgive others, the world and ourselves for this complexity and imperfection.  

Ronald Rolheiser

In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to understand that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.

Karl Rahner

Ten Commandments for Mature Living

This summer I have been reading (at the suggestion of Father Kenny and Laura Benge) Ronald Rolheiser’s book Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity.  In one chapter he elaborates on Ten Commandments for Mature Living.

The ten commandments given us in Scripture are warnings intended to keep us from falling into sin and into places where we should not be. They are not the standard for holiness, but a lowest common denominator, the minimal requirement for morality, the benchmark below which someone should not fall. Hence, each of them is prefaced by the command, ‘Thou shalt not!’. The series of commandments here for a mature discipleship have a different intent, to invite us to a higher place, to a deeper maturity and a more intimate relationship with God and one another. Hence they are invitations rather than commands, and consequently each begins with a positive invitation.

For the next 10 weeks I am going to attempt to practice one of these. And I may just blog about them (which may help me keep going) and include some quotes (what a surprise, Carolyn offering quotes!) and a few thoughts.  No promises.

The first one is this:

Live in gratitude and thank your Creator by enjoying your life.

Gratitude is the basis of all holiness. The holiest person you know is the most grateful person you know. That is true too for love: the most loving person you know is also the most grateful person you know because even love finds its basis in gratitude. Anything we call love, but that is not rooted in gratitude, will, at the end of the day be manipulative and self-serving. If our love and service to others does not begin in gratitude, we will end up carrying people’s crosses and sending them the bill.

(Referring to Luke 17:7-10) What Jesus is doing in this parable is drawing the distinction between what comes to us by right as opposed to what comes to us as gift. If each of us were given only what is owed to us, we would live like that servant just described. But we are given more, infinitely more. The real task of life than is to recognize that everything is a gift and that we need to keep saying thanks over and over again for all the things in life that we so much take for granted…

As well, our gratitude is meant to carry something else: enjoyment of the gift that is given to us. The highest compliment we can give a gift giver is to enjoy the gift thoroughly. We owe it to our Creator to appreciate things, to be as happy as we can be. Life is meant to be more than a test, and so we might add this to our daily prayer: give us this day our daily bread and help us to enjoy it without guilt.

Our level of maturity and generativity is synonymous with our level of gratitude- and mature people enjoy their lives.

“We will end up carrying people’s crosses and sending them the bill. “ Yikes.

I decided to do this today because I am so tired of being a caregiver. And on the verge of sending everyone the bill (spending the morning on the phone with Social Security and the afternoon at a doctors office can add up to a substantial bill…. just saying…) Angry at doing things for people. Sorry for myself. Gratitude far away. No grateful feelings in this heart.

So because I cannot muster up gratitude (reflecting my low level of maturity, see last sentence above!), I am practicing. Practicing giving thanks when I do not feel thankful. Practicing takes me to a place that  I cannot get to by trying. So here is my invitation to practice this week:

Live in gratitude and thank your Creator by enjoying your life.

I said to my son Roger one day, “I don’t do physics.”

He, patiently, answered, “You do physics every day.  You just don’t know it.”

I am realizing more and more the size of what we glimpse in Jesus... “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have looked upon, and touched with our hands concerning the word of life...”

There is so much that I don’t understand. Prayer, for example:  yesterday there was a desperate, seemingly necessary plea left apparently unanswered, and  the same day, another surprising intervention that is so exact that I cannot believe it to be coincidence? What is up with that?  (“If You are answering prayers today, God ... HOW ABOUT THIS ONE!!!”).

We have done each other a disservice when we try to explain things too much, as though we understand  everything. Reality, the action of God, life, love, resurrection are all great mysteries.  

We do them every day. We just don’t know it. 

The Fellowship of the Lymies

We are in the Lyme doc's office. Everyone is here because they are sick. Some desperately so ... in a wheelchair, on oxygen, unable to walk or talk or see or think clearly. Others don’t look as sick. But they can’t function fully. They are too weak, in too much pain, too foggy in their brain. Some are new to this, and tentative. Will all this be worth it? They have tried so many doctors before. Some are clearly getting better – they will tell you their stories, about years of sickness, then hope and treatment, and now some health, some vitality. They tell us about their protocol, what helped and what didn’t, how they spent everything they had to get to health, how grateful they are to those who have helped them. They give us all hope, and help us to persist.

The prescribed treatments are long, painful, and complex.  No two are quite alike, because the progression of each person’s disease is a little different.  The doctor prescribes and guides your treatment, but you have to say yes. You have to participate.  There are medicines to be taken, things to be avoided, regimens to be followed. No one does it alone. A friend or spouse or family member has been there to hand them the pills, hook them up to the IV, push them in the wheelchair into the office. Restoration comes slowly.

Online, I read reviews of the practice. “They saved my life”... “They are disorganized” ... “they want you to take all this expensive medicine.” Some have given up and settled for existence instead of life. Too hard, too long, too expensive. I don’t want to take all those pills. I can’t afford to come to this doctor. Maybe there is an easier way.

But we are here by faith. We have enough evidence to believe. We pay the cost and follow the regimen. Where else could we go?  And in the process, it is good to be here. The other patients and their caregivers understand. We are the Fellowship of the Lymies, in it together. Getting well.  “Yes,” we tell the others, it is worth it. Stick to it. The doc knows what he is doing, even though he may not be explaining it to you. (Would we understand it all anyway??)  He gets people well.”

I have told you a parable. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Gwen's Mama

"When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the god of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together so that all may see and know, all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it. " Isaiah 41:17-29

"Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’”

 

Gwen’s mama died this week.  I didn’t get to the funeral – but I heard about it, and I can picture it.

My friend Gwen came home to Kentucky from Vienna, Austria, ten years ago to take care of her mama who had developed Alzheimers.  It was  hard to leave Vienna. Gwen had a rich life in Vienna, and a ministry with diplomats and women at the United Nations from all over the world.  She gave it up, and moved  to Kentucky.

Gwen is a lifegiver wherever she is.  Instead of diplomats, she became a lifegiver to her Mama. And her cousins. And the lady across the street, and the hospice nurse, and the students she met at the college each week ... and  to whoever came across her path.  Friends came from all over to visit her. Not because they were sorry for her, stuck there in that little town... but because they wanted to get in on it, to be around her, to be refreshed by the life that flows from her.  (And maybe some of them also wanted a piece of her coconut pie. I’m just saying...)

The funeral, I gather, was a glimpse of the life she brought. Instead of a old woman dying alone, Gwen’s mama’s life  and home had become a garden. Because of Gwen.  The desert of old age, memory loss, and illness was transformed into a garden of love, kindness and joy, because there was a fountain there. The funeral was an opportunity to see and know, to consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it.

It is, after all the way He does things. By His Spirit and His word,  He makes people into springs and rivers, springs and rivers which make the deserts bloom.