Forget Despair: It's a God-Orchestrated Time Of Life

My first three phone calls this morning were—all three--with women of a certain age who have various forms of active cancer.

How could this have happened, I wonder? And yet it’s not as if I haven’t felt this stage of my life coming. Certainly I have. Time passes. We get sick and/or our parts start to fall off like so many parts of an old car speeding down the highway. “Where did the side mirror go? It was just here yesterday!”

I know this territory.

Still, this morning, after the last call, I put the phone down and slumped into a chair. OK, God. This is the deal now, right? Here we are: biopsies, surgeries, complications, memory loss, cancer, scoliosis, and macular degeneration—just to name a few. Walkers, canes, heart monitors and oxygen are common among us.

There is no getting away from it or escaping it. As my brother used to say, “It’s better than being on the wrong side of the grass!” But it isn’t easy either.

Various forms of frailty assail us: from niggling nuisance—contact allergy dermatitis—to frightening, gut wrenching serious—a tumor on the spine which may not be operable. And what do we do? We deal with each problem, one step at a time, in hopes that we can get ahead or at least stay even with whatever ails us. We engage; we learn doctor/ medical talk; we line ourselves up to be treated in good faith and pray like crazy that the outcome will be the best possible.

We are a brave lot.

Slumped into the chair this morning, I pondered: what can possibly be good about any of this? What is the God-orchestration of old age? It’s not so fun! No one could say that it is, but, still, I thought, there is something about this period of time in my life . . . something . . .

For example, never before in our lives have we needed each other more: to drive the car, to bring food, to make us laugh, to join us in consultation rooms with notebooks, to pray together, to celebrate success with us, to mourn with us, to struggle with us to remember the name of that movie Tom Hanks was in when he played that guy who was, well, you know, what is the word we are supposed to use nowadays for someone who is disadvantaged in that way? We laugh hysterically and wonder of wonders, someone comes up with Forrest Gump and we all cheer.

We understand each other. We are connected.

And that is the good stuff: the connection. That, and the forgiveness that can arise: forgiveness of whatever in the past may have caused us to judge one another. Forgiveness grows, nourished by our profound understanding of our mutual frailty and the humor we are able to share over our limitations.

  To my way of thinking, this is our chance to free ourselves from the weight of whatever axe we have been grinding: to drop our story lines about how life and people should be and, instead, become available to love others and ourselves in the most all-encompassing, compassionate manner we may have ever experienced.

As physically and emotionally challenging as this part of our lives can be, how can we say that it is useless or wasted? It is not. If one is willing, it can be similar to the heart blasting- open experience of when that first baby was born and, looking into her/his eyes, you realized that you had, to this point, no concept of how profoundly  you were capable of loving.

 It occurs to me that, if we choose and if we dare to seize the opportunity offered by this period of our lives, we can be in that heart-open state again. We can complete our time here on this earth in a landslide of compassion for one another.

It cannot get any better than this: A chance to become who we were meant to be.

All The Light We Cannot See? It's Everywhere!

On Thursday last week I gave a report on a book to my once-a month-book group. The book was magnificent. I had already read it, knew I would need to read it again, forgot it was over 500 pages long and that during this second reading I would have to take careful notes throughout. A bit of a crush.

 Nonetheless, if you haven’t read the Pulitzer prize-winning novel, All The Light We cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, head for the beach this summer with that book in your bag. Give yourself a treat.

All The Light . . . takes place in Germany and occupied France during WW 2.The heroine is a young French girl who is blind. Doerr takes us into her blindness like no author I have ever read. There are many wonderfully drawn, complex characters in this book, top among them a brilliant, orphaned, German boy who can build radios.

After my talk, a woman came up to me and asked what I thought about the title: “All the Light We Cannot See?” She queried. “That’s not just about being blind, is it?”

“I think not,” was my response, but then someone else joined us and the conversation immediately shifted.

I’ve been thinking about her question ever since. Asking myself, for example, what is the light that I cannot, that I fail to see? I know the world is filled with light; it comes shining, vibrating, off all living things. You’ve seen photographs of the auric energy fields of trees and flowers and snails, etc., I’m sure. And if you haven’t, I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it—or not—but the light is there. We emanate light, sometimes more than others. I’ll wager that intuitively you know when you are emanating more or less light than usual. Dark moods are not called “dark” for a reason.

Think of the times when we just cannot solve a problem. We wrestle with it in our minds, twisting it back and forth, tearing our hair, and then, suddenly, usually when we are doing something else, flash! We are switched on. At once we know what to do. It just happens. A revelation, an insight. We don’t see it coming but we know it as light, a light that we cannot see, but a light that brings absolute clarity to our problem. 

We often miss the light coming from other people. Caught up in our own dramas, our own stories, we can fail to perceive the loving light of others. Or we take it for granted and don’t slow down long enough to actually feel that light coming from another person toward us. We lose the opportunity to allow that light to nurture us.

I have to have a couple of medical tests. Nothing serious: just bloody annoying. It makes me rocky as all get out when I feel like I can’t take care of myself. Left to my own devices, I obsess about such matters. It’s a habit I’d like to break, but so far, not much luck.

Anyway, the day that my spiritual study group was meeting, my light was pretty dim. I told them about the tests pending-- the first is something I can certainly drive myself to—when one of our group looked straight at me and said, flat out, “I will go with you.”

 Whammo! The beam of her light flooded my solar plexus and my voice in response sounded about six years old. “You will?”

She didn’t ask me. “Would you like me to go with you?” to which I probably would have responded, “Oh, thanks, but that’s not necessary. I can do it.” So accustomed am I . . .

She didn’t ask me; she told me. Weak-kneed with the loving power,  the sheer generosity of that offer—I know she’s a busy woman— I was overwhelmed. Still, I did manage to say, “Thank you! I would love that!”

All the light we cannot see: all the amazing light that is in the Universe in so many ways that we do not fashion. The more we open ourselves to it the more we will receive and, conversely, the more light we can generate. This is awesome. To Christians, it’s the Christ light within us, emanations of the Holy Spirit. Whatever we call it, however we experience it, it is there. That is the light that calls us to consciousness and the same light that we manifest when we become conscious. We may never actually see it.

***

 Meanwhile there is much darkness in Charleston, North Carolina this week: a great darkness in our entire country surrounding racial issues, gun control, and mental health.

Please, God, shine your light upon us. Light our way to understanding how to shine your loving light on ALL people. 
We stand as witnesses to those who, having lost loved ones in the dreadful shooting, have chosen to send the light of forgiveness to the shooter, Dylan Roof. God bless them all.