Looking to the future!
Originally uploaded by Haggis Chick
There is a song by Ingrid Michaelson that touches me in a place where I feel the remnants of my broken places deep inside ... a very small place. A video of her song is below.
This arose after a couple of tender encounters with some friends in my AA community last evening who shared about their own struggles, from these very small places inside of them too. One friend, whose birthday is today, contemplated getting completely wasted on his 52nd birthday because he had not yet accomplished what he thought he should have by now. In his 18 plus years of sobriety, it was deeply painful to look at how he has measured himself up to societal standards of success. Sharing this in the fellowship helped him recognize the living miracle and success that he is, just as he is. Another friend shared how sleeping alone in her parents' home still brings terror and that she would be doing so over the next few days while her parents were on vacation. A horrific event happened while she was alone in this very house and it still haunts her as an adult. She does not want to drink over this anymore.
As Divinely timed as always, I open my teacher Jason's book today. His opening passage is as follows: "The hard work of truly awakening involves getting a clear idea of just how much of reality we cannot hold, of how much of life we cannot bear. We need to see how liimited we really are. Then we will have the chance to meet God in reality and not in the fateful fantasy of saving or punishing ourselves."
This passage brings an interesting perspective for me: remaining in my "Woe is me" identity found me believing I was very limited in terms of how much I could truly bear of my life; stepping out of this victimized personality has actually found me being able to hold much more reality and bear much more in my life than I ever imagined possible. What I am taking away, however, from this passage is the fact that I do not have to always have an ever-expansive container or be able to meet all of reality all of the time; to stay in this idealized place would be saving myself from feeling my fragility and my limitations. This recognition of the crossroads where I "break" is the very place I meet God in too. As I learned a number of months back: Quan Yin gets angry. I would now venture to speculate: and she feels where she cannot hold and bear suffering. This is perhaps what makes her that much more compassionate.
As I really let this work through me I realize that some of the most precious conversations I have had with God in prayer start something like this: "God, I need you to hold ______. I am struggling and I don't feel like I can do this right now..." It is this kind of admission to God that really does bring me in closer relationship -- an awareness that I am not able to bear something and that I need help to have it held. In this moment, I am actually feeling what "surrendering" really is ... lot of tears coming right now ...
We are just breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys ...
No comments:
Post a Comment