When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we’re finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it’s down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is “Wow,” that’s a prayer.
We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter what messes we’ve made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.
But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.
There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer’s block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock.
Prayer usually means praise, or surrender, acknowledging that you have run out of bullets.
They say we are punished not for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive.
We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you’ll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you’ll see at least one next right step you can take.
Yet union with a partner – someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies with, and read together in bed with, and do hard tasks with, and are loved by. That sounds really lovely.
The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world.
You celebrate what works and you take tender care of what doesn’t, with lotion, polish, and kindness.
But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering. I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.
When you’re kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back – the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy’s Law.
You need to find people who laugh gently at themselves, who remind you gently to lighten up.
Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can’t be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.
My lifelong and core belief, right after the conviction that I was defective, mildly annoying, and better than everyone else was that my help was helpful.
I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge.
Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram – it’s the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.
And I guess when you take away the resentment and disappointment, it’s that simple. It is what we do in families: we help, because we were helped.
Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken – those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers.
Thanks’ is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.