Friday, November 10, 2023
Memorial of Saint Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Dizzy with joy
You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable. My general-purpose go-to mystic Rumi said, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” and bearing the barely bearable is one of the best. – Anne Lamott
Margaret woke me up with a shout. “I need your help. I have vertigo and I can barely move.”
But vertigo is not just dizzy. Although it certainly is that, like being upside down on the world’s scariest roller coaster and spinning, spinning, spinning.
It is also nausea. Put it together and you are powerless. So we stayed together over the next few hours, as the vertigo eased and we could make it to a new doctor’s office- – a neurologist, actually, who might have some thoughts about this vertigo that has gradually, lately, been getting worse.
We take turns caring for each other these days. I think that’s one reason why people get married. For better, for worse. In sickness and in health. And of course the difficulty we encounter as we take turns being “worse” and “in sickness,” the difficulty is mostly the point. Why live a life of ease, comfort, satisfaction and … sloth? Better to put our commitment to the test. As Paul says of himself and to his friends, we say of each other and to each other, “Fight the good fight. Finish the race. Keep the faith.”
We need not talk very much. Our behavior toward one another speaks louder than any language. St. Francis told his disciples, “Preach always. If necessary, use words.” We too share much more in our silent service than any words can tell. Thinking of this, Ron Rolheiser says:
Silence is a language that is infinitely deeper, more far-reaching, more understanding, more compassionate, and more eternal than any other language. In heaven, it seems, there will be no languages, no words. Silence will speak. We will wholly, intimately, and ecstatically hold each other in silence, in perfect understanding.
Words, for all their value, are part of the reason why we can’t do this already. They divide as much as they unite. There is a deeper connection available in silence. Lovers already know this, as do the Quakers whose liturgy tries to imitate the silence of heaven, and as do those who practice contemplative prayer. John of the Cross expresses this in a wonderfully cryptic line: “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.”
In spite of our shared family, and shared marriage, and shared home, Margaret and I are as different as we can be sometimes. But God chisels us into the same sculpture, a 44 year-old masterpiece. These days the chiseling and sanding and smoothing are no less painful. But we know we can’t get away, not for long, so we stand up to each other, and then pray for each other, and God’s constant attendance to us becomes evident, again and again. Morning by morning, thy mercies we see.
I myself am convinced about you that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to admonish one another.
Try talking about this with others? Difficult. Unless those we talk with are also married, especially if they have been married for decades, and especially if they have not constructed too many escape routes away from each other. Just as in boxing matches, we get three minutes in the corner to rest and get cold water thrown over our heads and then … back in the ring.
But unlike boxing, we will eventually, sooner or later, move back into the ring to embrace.
 (Romans 15, Psalm 98, 1 John 2, Luke 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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