Fear and Courage

I woke up awhile ago to the thought that I should delete all posts from the last few days ~ all the posts which show me at my worst and are little more than a self-indulgent dip here and there into the fears and sadnesses that accompany breast cancer and its treatment.

I've decided to leave them up, for the time being anyway, as a reminder to me, even if to no one else, of how easy it is to slide into a state of fearfulness and to let anxiety about myself and my well-being control my decision-making and, ultimately, define who I am.

One of the things about Joel Osteen and his ilk that sends me into a paroxysm of sarcasm is his  constant emphasis on "I" ~ that "I" who is, indeed, filled with fear and pain, who feels alone and terrified and unheard ~ as the solution to my own anxiety, as if my own anxiety were, indeed, the problem.

The reality is that my anxiety is nothing more than the symptom of the real challenge, that challenge being the ease with which illness and loss and all that accompanies them separate me from the confidence that a loving God is laboring on my behalf in all circumstances.

Last night my daughter unwittingly offered me a clue that set me on a new path in unraveling this mystery of challenge and response.  Hearing the story of my early-morning pre-surgery procedure for the first time, she shook her head and said, "I don't understand why the doctors don't listen to you.  You really did everything that you could in advance to explain that your experience of pain is apparently an unusual one.  It sounds like the surgeon nodded and then went on automatic pilot, and then was surprised at the outcome.  It might have been better for her to have said, 'This doesn't usually hurt but, given your description of past procedures, I can't guarantee that.' "

Yes, that kind of candor might have made things a bit easier.  (Also: If she had not insisted that my friend leave.  Note to self: Leave no stone unturned in your preparation.)

But perhaps the important question has little to do with medical procedures or with my response to them.  Perhaps the real question is the one that my professor asked over and over again in my ordination sermon: What is Jesus doing?  Or, as I might put it, in perhaps a less Reformed and more Ignatian manner: into what is God inviting me?

Let's start with reality: I are not young, or strong, or brave, or beautiful, or pain-free, and no insistence otherwise will make me so. (No, I'm not fishing for compliments.  I'm trying to think this through.) But then, if this is not about me, those cover-of-People-Magazine attributes matter little.  What matters is:  What is God doing?

 

My knee-jerk reaction is to say: "Ya got me."

But seriously.  Last summer, Jesuit Father Jim Martin said on The Colbert Report that God's job is to sustain the universe.  If that's the case, and if we believe that what God is doing is, in fact, God's job ~ sustaining the universe ~ then what questions should we be asking, what invitation should we be looking for, during these times when it does, indeed, seem that God is dropping and losing things all over the place?

The Spiritual Journey

A couple of days ago, I longed for my camera as I walked down the woodland cemetery path. It lingers along the stream carved through the hillside center of the grounds.  The sunlight sparkled across the clear water, which rippled gently across the rocky creek bed.  The stream practically sang aloud.

The next day, an early-morning deluge had altered the entire scene.  The water, thick and murky, rushed down its channel; it was so much deeper than it had been only twenty-four hours earlier that only the slightest hint of rapids was visible.  Nothing called for a camera; it appeared, in fact, as if survival were at stake.

The Spiritual Practice of Household Composition - 1

Just for fun: Jot down five places you've lived in your life. Anyplace, including a dorm room, counts. Do it quickly. Now write down your favorite thing about each place. See any commonalities? Any reflections in what they mean?

Observation: I did this the other night and included my childhood home, a college dorm room, and three apartments. What jumped out? That my favorite thing about four of the five was windows: big, wall-spanning windows. Some looked out onto hills and woods and water, and some onto city streets, but all of them were big and let sunlight pour into the indoors.

Reality: I have never paid the slightest attention to "window treatments." Actually, we have almost none. When we moved into this house, we had curtain panels on rods that covered the bottom halves of most of the windows, courtesy of the prior owners. Three children in three years ~ meaning that at one point their ages were five, five, and two ~ meant that said rods and curtains were quickly dismantled. And never replaced with anything. Some of the bedrooms have curtains, but not all.

Reflection: There are big windows across the front of our house, which faces sort of north. The best light in the house is the mellow yellow afternoon light that streams into the living and dining rooms from those windows. But there are big double-hung windows, lots of them, on all sides of the house. The views aren't much, but the light is wonderful.

The spiritual part: The windows and the light they offer are much more significant than I've been conscious of. What can I do, I wonder, to enhance and draw attention to the windows themselves, and to take better advantage of the light in terms of displaying artwork around the house? What might draw the windows and the light into the design of our interiors, so that the windows become integral aspects of the rooms rather then mere slots through which light is transferred?

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Why I Wake Early
by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
\and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even,
the miserable and the crotchety
– best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens to be
where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light
– good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

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That is not why I wake early. I wake early because I can't sleep more than a few hours at a stretch. But when I wake up, there is light. Or there will be, in another hour or two. And so: windows. I want to become aware of windows.