Thursday, August 18, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Stand and hold the suffering in your life
I will pour clean water on you and wash away all your sins.
In the 100 degree afternoon sun, under a bright blue sky, I bent over Miles’ car seat, attempting to wrench it free from the anchors in our back seat. I took off my watch, because invariably the face gets scratched when I do this. I put on my hat again, and the soaked sweat band felt a little cool. I caught my breath, which I had to do several times because the Graco engineers made this removal almost impossible.
I will sprinkle clean water upon you, I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you.
How much did we actually want to take George along with us to Aldi and the Monument Café the next day? Well, a lot … so I persevered. When I felt the release, the click, the movement of that awful black strap come up out of its cavern, I roared a terrible roar of relief, exhaled and relaxed.
Such a small suffering, this bending over in the back seat. There are far bigger ones, and deeper ones, the sufferings that lead to poverty or despair, breakdown or death. And leaning over the car seat until the work is absolutely finished, helps me face the others. Richard Rohr talks about “the trustworthy authority that belongs to those who have stood with and held the suffering of their lives and the world, rather than fled and avoided it:”
Jesus on the cross and Mary standing near him are powerful witnesses to transformative spirituality. They return no hostility, hatred, accusations, or malice directed at them. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection, and that’s the core mystery of Christianity.
It often takes our whole lives to begin to comprehend this, because our natural instinct is trying to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, attempting to understand it. The ego insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It’s the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold contraries, until we are moved by grace to a much deeper level and a much larger frame. Our private pain does not take center stage, but becomes a mystery shared with every act of bloodshed and every tear wept since the beginning of time. Our pain is not just our own. The normal mind can’t deal with that.
Standing beside our Prius for just a moment, catching the slight breeze, I breathed in and breathed out.
That’s why mature religion always teaches some form of contemplation—to break our addiction to this egoic, disconnected thinking.
Not right away but certainly, over time, the addiction will be broken. Rather than resenting suffering as unfair, I will learn to relax into it.
Sometimes I think of Texas as what’s left of the last resting place mostly of murderers and other nefarians. But then I think of Davy Crockett, whose birthday was yesterday. Remembered by Garrison Keillor, Davy may well have learned to relax into suffering and not take it so personally, which eventually made him a hero.
But first Davy tried politics and was elected to Congress from Tennessee.
On his way to Congress, he reportedly bragged to a crowd, “I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust [tree].”
And besides all that, he played a handsome fiddle.
But Davy was defeated in 1835 by a peg-legged lawyer named Andrew Huntsman, and gave up politics, saying, “Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” He left the next day, and he was killed at the Battle of the Alamo the following year.
From all accounts, Davy Crockett was a calming influence in the Alamo while the soldiers waited for Santa Anna. He had learned the art of suffering, and shared what he discovered with the others.
I will put my spirit within you and show you how to live by my law. You shall be my people and I shall be your God.
(Ezekiel 36, Psalm 51, Psalm 95, Matthew 22)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
