NOTE: we are on holiday for rest and reflection in Montreal before a new year of engagement, teaching and creativity begins. This is the first in a series.
Back in my days in the church, I was often frazzled, flummoxed and eventually flattened whenever I was called to sit with another in pain. In time I came to understand this was all I could do really do - sit in silence and share another's suffering - but, at first, it always felt inadequate. Indeed, the staggering agony of someone's anguish regularly struck me as excruciating. Harrowing. And incompetent. Always incompetent. As a young and inexperienced clergy person, I wanted to help - and I was certain that helping meant easing and resolving another's torment. Isn't that what Jesus did?
Years and years later, after decades of sitting in silence at countless bedsides, hospital rooms and hospice centers as well as serious work with both my therapist and spiritual director, I was able to own two truths. First, I am not Jesus. Never was and never will be; that's a biggie for all clergy (male as well as female) as we often carry a not too subtle Messiah complex. And second, while sharing another's wound in silence rarely feels like it is very much, it is both all we can do and is sufficient for the day. One wise soul has concluded that being present in another's pain - holding it and honoring - lightens another's load. Compassion is solidarity in suffering: the human equivalence of God's grace with healthy boundaries.
I will hold the Christ light for you
In the night time of your fear
I will hold my hand out to you
Speak the the peace you long to hear.
I will weep when you are weeping
When you laugh, I'll laugh with you
I will share your joy and sorrow
Till we've seen this journey through.
Sitting in silence, holding another in their sadness and pain, opening our hearts in compassion without trying to fix what cannot be fixed still feels incomplete. And it is supposed to. We are not God. We are barely in control of our own lives. Serenity, peace, a measure of hope, and a taste of joy come to us in this realm through courage and acceptance. They are gifts. Like the late Jean Vanier of L'Arche put:
What I came to know - and still need to trust and relearn repeatedly - is that my emotional and spiritual inadequacy is not only a true reflection of my humanity, it is also a quiet call to stay connected in community. We are rarely asked to be heroes. What's more, we need to know that the pain will always hurt. It should. It must.
Yet even in our sorrow, within the confines of a healing and holy human heart, this pain leads us into deeper life. St. Paul experienced this and shared it with us in Romans 5: "We can celebrate our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because hope is God’s love being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit."
A contemporary rendering by the poet Connie Voisine cuts to the heart in her: "A world's too little for thy tent, a grave too big for me."
There aren’t enough doves
in North America to fill
the gondola of you.
Onions are fallible, only
pretending to be infinite,
and the Great Plains—
well, they’re not that great.
You might fit a thousand of me
in your purse; the distance
between my nose and lip is mere
centimeters. I know I am only a pat
of butter, a blueberry, an aspirin,
a quivering cell about to dissolve,
to you.
Haven’t you noticed that even
the sphinx is growing smaller
each day? What can that fawn,
retreating, legs a pile of cutlery,
expect from the approaching dog?
What good is my will when your voice
is what I mistake the freight trains
that shake my windows for?
When I close my eyes, I return
to the tomb of night. I return
to you, or the idea of you, and
I walk down corridors dragging
my fingers along the wall,
looking for that café, warm
and brightly lit, where I stopped
asking so many questions.
I ate a sandwich and was called
something dear by a stranger.
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