WE MAKE OUR HEARTS HARD

No one likes to suffer. Pain hurts. To deny that truth is to live in another world. There are degrees of hurt, of pain. We know that. There are also different kinds of pain. The pain from a broken leg is different from the pain of a broken heart. Both are painful. The degree of pain and how one endures that pain is different, also, according to the one who is suffering.

Some are better than others in dealing with pain. Some people have a higher threshold for pain than others, but a higher threshold does not mean no threshold. Pain is pain, suffering is suffering, and no one escapes either in this life in this world. Jesus did not. Neither do we. One can debate why one has to suffer at all given our faith in and all-good and all-powerful and all-loving God. But that is another matter for another time.

In the meantime, suffering and pain are the lot of each and every one of us. How we deal with physical pain is one matter. Therapists of every kind have ways to help us do so, some better than others. Mind-over-matter often helps. Medication can help even more. What both do is mask the pain making it easier for us to function. But the pain is still there and it is felt if the mind rests or the medication wears off.

Often, however, the greater pain is not the physical. It is the mental suffering that stops us dead in our tracks. It is the suffering without physical pain that sometimes overwhelms us. It is the suffering, the pain, that is inflicted upon us by another, by circumstances beyond our control, by something we did not do or simply by who we are that causes so much personal grief.

Persecution, the color of our skin, our sexual orientation, where we were born, our physical features – all these and more cause us pain and suffering because others deem them to be humiliating, debasing and degrading and then make that known to us by what they say and, even more, by the way they treat us. We see that every day in this world of ours by the way others are unjustly, unfairly and unlovingly treated simply because they are somehow different.

But we all are in one way or another. Yet what is important is how we respond to the other when our hearts and souls are hurt because of who we are and not because of something we have done. We can harden our hearts and souls and act accordingly, which will do nothing to transform the one who is hurting us and will not lessen our pain. Or we can soften our hearts and souls by forgiving their ignorance and acting accordingly. 

The truth is that when we harden our hearts, we only make the pain, our pain, worse. It is when and only when we soften our hearts, consider the source of the pain and forgive the ignorance and foolishness of the one or ones who are hurting us that we can find peace of mind. Even more, in the process of forgiving, we might convert the one who has hurt us. Jesus’ forgiveness on the cross of those unjustly inflicting on him both physical and mental anguish is our example. Jesus could not die with a self-hardened heart. We cannot live with one. As with Jesus, so with us: the choice is always ours.

“AN EYE FOR AN EYE” DOESN’T WORK

As human beings there seems to be something deep inside us that wants to redress any harm done to us by another that we believe to be unjust and certainly unmerited. We want to get even. And sometimes we want to go the other one better. An eye for an eye in that instance is not enough so angry are we at what has happened to us and with the one who perpetrated that evil.

The fact that this need to get even, to pay back, seems to be inherently human does not mean that it is morally all right to satisfy that need. Furthermore, just because there is a felt need does not mean that we are justified to actually respond to that need in some observable and actual manner. Civil laws, of course, are based on society’s need to redress affronts to society. We make laws to keep society orderly. When that order is broken, society sets up a system of punishments to redress the harm done and society is justified in doing so – for the good and good ordering of that society.

The real issue and the real problem at hand is that the harm done cannot be undone no matter what the punishment meted out may be. It is a done deal. The crime has been committed, the harm done. What causes society to want revenge and to actually take revenge and what causes so much angst is that the threat of punishment was no deterrent. The perpetrator was intent on doing what he knew was unlawful, would be punishable if caught, but broke the law anyway. Is it any wonder that society wants an eye for an eye, and sometimes even more?

And is it any wonder that we, even as Christians, desire the same? No sin, no affront, is accidental. It is deliberate. True accidents can and should be forgiven if they were truly accidents and not the result of foolishly doing what we knew we should not be doing in the first place. Deliberately and knowingly driving under the influence of alcohol, for instance, and causing an accident is inexcusable. As humans, let alone as Christians, we demand some form of punishment.

And yet there is that nagging feeling inside us that says there has to be a better way. A simple forgiveness of a deliberate hurt should be transforming. It should give the one forgiven pause so that he will take time to reflect on what he did, decide not to do it again and apologize for the harm done even though, regrettably, that harm cannot be undone so that no apology would even be necessary. We also know from experience that repaying in kind for the harm done does not change the person who hurt us and certainly does not change us. It only makes matters worse, meaning that the hurt inflicted next time – and there will be a next time – will only be worse.

As Christians we must be agents of transformation not by repaying evil for evil, sin for sin, an eye for an eye, but by doing what we can to lessen our own need to get even and trust that forgiveness without revenge will help transform the one forgiven and make us stronger in the process. In truth, we know that this is true. When, in the past, we have forgiven another or been forgiven, we have been an agent of transformation and we have been transformed in the process. Would that this always be the case.

EMPATHY

It is not easy to walk in another person’s shoes. In fact, we cannot even as that old Indian admonition tells us that we must walk in another’s moccasins if we want to understand that person, understand what he or she is going through at this moment in time. When we care about someone who is suffering, it is much easier to sympathize with that person rather than empathize.

In a way it is also safer. We sympathize from a distance. Empathy demands a hands-on response. We have to be there with the other who is going through a difficult and, usually, a painful time. That is what makes being empathetic so hard. It involves, demands, our deliberately entering into a painful situation when every fiber of our being tells us to run away as fast as we can. Only fools, our inner selves tell us, bring on pain and suffering willingly.

St. Paul calls this being fools for Christ’s sake, for the sake of those Jesus loves, namely, everyone. We are not Jesus, of course, and we cannot love everyone. We can only hope to love and empathize with those we do love and care about. It takes the grace of God, sometimes, to almost force ourselves into those situations where we must suffer along with the one we love in order to help that person deal with his or her suffering.

Empathy, of course, does not mean that we suffer physically with the one we love. It does mean that when we say “I feel your pain,” we actually do feel pain, that there is an inner hurt that we cannot really describe or define or even number – “Is it a three or a seven?” It is simply there and we hurt because someone we love is hurting or because of the vagaries of life in this world.

Life is complex and that is putting it mildly.  And while we may wish life’s issues were black and white, either good or bad, we know they are not. When they are not, when there is no right answer to a problem, no logical reason why this person is suffering and that person is not, why, for instance, in battle one soldier is killed and the one next to him survives – when we find ourselves in such confusing and complex situations, we suffer with the one grieving and in pain while at the same time being thankful we have been spared.

And sometimes the knowledge that we have been spared is often more painful than had we been the one to suffer in the first place. Much of the post-traumatic stress from war comes from having escaped that which your buddies in battle did not. “Why them and not me?” is empathy to the nth degree. Added to that is the empathetic pain we suffer when we deal with the question of why any of this is so, why we have to suffer in the first place and, even more, why we inflict pain and suffering in others.

What all this means, I think, is that empathy often means having to live with unanswered and even unanswerable questions and suffer the pain that comes with no recourse other than to know that we are not alone and that empathy is demanded not only if we are to be human but also if we are to make it through this life with some sense of sanity.

MORE THAN SKIN DEEP

Rachel Joyce in her novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry tells the story of a retired gentleman who goes on both an unlikely and unintended pilgrimage. Harold Fry receives a letter from a former colleague who tells him that she is dying of cancer. He writes her a letter to cheer her up and promises to come see her, encouraging her to hang on until he gets there hoping that his visit will somehow lift her spirits and perhaps even reverse the cancer.

Harold writes the letter, places it an envelope, puts a stamp on the envelope and heads to the mailbox to send it on its way. When Harold arrives at the mailbox, instead of depositing the letter, he keeps on walking, eventually all the way to the nursing home where she resides – 500 miles away.

Harold has no change of clothes and his yachting shoes are not made for such excursions, certainly not 500 miles worth. He has no cell phone, indispensable these days, and little cash; but he does have a credit card which he uses to find lodging along the way when he can’t sleep under trees and pay for food to keep up his strength for the journey. The only problem is that he knows the money he is spending (wasting? he wonders) is depleting the retirement funds he and his wife are counting on to see them through the rest of their lives.

No one knows about Harold’s adventure in the beginning, not even his wife. But eventually word gets out and he begins to attract hangers-on who make part of the journey with him. He also attracts the attention of the press, print and video. He becomes a curiosity piece to many. But he also becomes somewhat of a folk hero as well. Joyce writes: “They believed in him. They looked at his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious.”

What people, at least some people, began to see in Harold went much further than skin deep. They saw what was not visibly obvious to those who see no further than their own noses, as it were. Those who saw with different eyes were able to look beyond the outward appearances and into the depths of this man, this pilgrim, and see so much more. And they knew deep in their hearts that if there were so much more to Harold Fry, then there was so much more to the one who looked back at them every morning in the bathroom mirror. And that gave them hope.

In many ways in his own unacknowledged awareness Harold Fry was a Christ figure. Jesus was constantly reminding those who could not see in themselves what he saw in them: they were good people, people loved by God even though society thought them to be losers, sinners, foolish, whatever. Jesus always looked beyond the surface, beyond the outer appearances, beyond the skin, deep into the person him- or herself. So must we.

We need to see in ourselves and see in others what Jesus sees no matter what the outward appearances may be: a child of God, beloved of God.

 

IT’S NOT DIRECTED TOWARD ME

Church attendance is down all over the world. That is obvious, the megachurches notwithstanding whose members exit the back door as quickly as they enter the front.  There are, no doubt, many reasons for this, much of it the fault of the church itself. Perhaps it is cyclical. Perhaps we are in one of those downturns in the outward observance of religious practices. Perhaps we are awaiting the next Great Awakening to revive church life. Perhaps. Only time will tell.

In the meantime it is always good to explore why less and less people are attending church, especially in the West, the “sophisticated and educated” part of the world. Are we in the West so wise not to be so foolish to think that organized religion is all that important in our daily lives? Have we not found meaning and fulfillment outside the church structure and found guidance for our lives outside of church dogma? Many seem to think so.

Many people these days, according to the poll-takers, claim that while they are not religious, meaning they do not belong to or attend a church, assert that they are indeed spiritual people: spiritual but not religious. Perhaps they are. They claim to get more out of sitting on a bank of a creek soaking in all of God’s creation than they do going to a worship service at some church. They assert that a quiet Sunday at home, reading the paper, drinking a latte they hurried down to the nearest Starbucks to purchase, conversing with their spouse is more fulfilling than formal worship. Besides, they say, “I don’t get anything out of worship.”

They are probably right. To get something out of worship we have to put something in to it. And what we have to put into worship is ourselves. Even more, and the main point of all this, is that worship is not directed toward the worshipper. It is directed to the one we gather to worship in the first place: God. We come to church to worship God, not to be entertained, not to be calmed by the rippling sounds of the creek or the soothing taste of that latte in our hands. Worship was never meant to be entertaining or even soothing.

We call our worship service liturgy. The root meaning of that word in Greek is “public service”. In other words, it means work. Liturgy is truly the work of the people. Worship is to be work, our work of worshipping our God. In fact, when we have concluded our worship, we should be tired, even exhausted because we have put so much of ourselves into that service. Worship is not so much about getting something out of what we are doing as it is about putting all of ourselves into what we are doing. It is indeed work.

It is easy to be spiritual. It is a walk in the park, literally and figuratively. Being spiritual is centering on the self and is all about oneself. It is directed inward. It is difficult, hard work, to be religious, to do what is necessary to be the person God created us to be. Why? Because being religious means being centered outside ourselves: on God and on others. That does not mean that one cannot be religious and spiritual at the same time. In fact, when we are living out our faith, when we are worshipping our God, it is indeed, in word and in deed, a deeply religious and spiritual experience.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Frank, or maybe it’s Ernest, I’m not sure who is who, is reading the newspaper (in the Frank & Ernest comic strip by Bob Thaves), asks, “What concerns you more about politicians, unanswered questions or unquestioned answers?” Lest anyone’s hackles get aroused, let us all admit that while politicians are experts at both not answering specific questions with specific answers and insisting their answers to specific questions be unquestioned, so are we all.

We citizens are even more guilty when we demand of our politicians, our elected leaders, that they give us a simple and short answer to a very difficult and convoluted issue. We want answers and we want answers now and we want the answer to be as least painful to us individually as possible, no pain being the preferred choice. We know in our heads that that is impossible, but that is what we would like and what we want to hear.

There are no simple, easy answers to the many and varied questions, issues, that confront us as a nation, as a world, as a church, even as individual people. What is even more difficult to deal with is that there will always be more questions than answers and that when we have resolved this question, this issue, another will follow right on its heels and probably be even more difficult.

That said, the point of Thaves’ strip is still valid. No one has all the answers: not the President, not the Pope, not you or me. Further, just because we may be in a position of power does not give us the right to believe our answer should go unquestioned or that our response of “because I said so” is sufficient.  Ignoring the question only makes the matter worse because it won’t go away and make it even more difficult to resolve.

And no one answer is the answer. This world, this life, is too complicated for simple, easy, uncomplicated solutions to complex issues. We know that. We know that in our own lives. Personal issues are almost always very complex and cannot be resolved with simple answers. Why? Because more than one person is usually involved in the problem and its resolution. The more people involved, the more complicated and the more difficult the resolution.

And even when the only person involved is our self, when the issue at hand is very and strictly personal, even then the correct response, while simply given, is hardly ever easy to fulfill. The problem of being overweight is simple: eat less. The problem of over-spending is to spend less. The problem of being unkind all too often is to change our ways. The problem can be simply stated and the resolution simply given, but that does not mean it will be easy for us to actually resolve the problem.

The further issue is that we are often our own worst enemy. We do not like to admit that we are both part of the problem and we are also part of the solution, whatever the problem. While we can blame and castigate our politicians for acting like the politicians Frank and Ernest think them to be, all too often in our personal lives in many ways we are they.

PSALM 23

A friend of mine sent me a reflection on Psalm 23, the King James Version (the one, it seems, that is most popular even though its language is somewhat dated). In the reflection, each line in the psalm has a one-word explanation, if you will, of what that line really means for us who pray the psalm and believe and mean what we are saying when we do use it in personal prayer: thus, the words of the psalm, their one-word meaning and, for what it’s worth, my reflection on that word.

The Lord is my shepherd: that’s relationship. (Without a relationship with God life would be meaningless and empty.)  I shall not want: that’s supply. (God gives us all that we need.)

He maketh me lie die in green pastures: that’s rest. (is vital to a whole and healthy life. We must take those times of rest to rest.)  He leadeth me beside still waters: that’s refreshement. (While we rest, we are refreshed.)

He restoreth my soul; that’s healing. (We are all wounded, wounded by our own sin and by the sins of others. We are all healed because God always forgives.)

He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness: that’s guidance. (Whenever we get lost, and we all do at times, if we are open to God’s leading, we will find our way.) For his name’s sake: that’s purpose. (Why we do what we do: we do it for you, Lord.)

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death:  that’s testing. (Testing is part of life, part of being human. We are all tempted: no exemptions.)  I will fear no evil:  that’s protection. (God is stronger than any evil. Never forget that.)  For thou art with me:  that’s faithfulness. (God never, ever abandons us. Never.)

Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me: that’s discipline. (We learn through discipline, from the pain our mistakes, deliberate and otherwise, cause. That is good.)

Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies: that’s hope. (When, at times, all may seem lost, we know it is not. We will find our way. God will see to it.)

Thou annointest my head with oil: that’s consecration. (We are God’s children.)

My cup runneth over:  that’s abundance. (We always have more than enough.)

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:  that’s blessing. (We are never alone. We never walk alone. God is always with us.)

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord: that’s security. (Our house is the Lord’s house. The Lord’s house is our house, our home.)

Forever: that’s eternity. (No more need be said.)