No Holes The old woman in Catherynne M. Valente’s novel, Deathless, has no name, yet she still suffers. Her soldier son, Vitaliy, died when a bullet pierced him through. Even so, when Ivan Tsarevich wanders by, a stranger to the woman as she is a stranger to him, she invites him into her home. She shows him the food on the plates and tells him to eat. He should eat, he should get fat, he should live. “Be alive,” she tells him. She says this because she knows about holes. Her son died because of the hole inside him, and she, too, has a hole “like a bullet” in her…
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From Suffering to Love
Seeking Relief from Suffering “Why shouldn’t people suffer?” one of our members asked during a sharing circle. “Maybe that’s why they’re good people.” The question of why suffering exists often comes up as we explore together what it means to be human, ponder how we can better serve the common good, and consider how to help our hearts grow in empathy. Suffering can help us develop kindness and compassion, but that doesn’t mean we like it. If God is real, and if She has anything to do with love, we wonder how She can allow her creatures to experience so much pain? It may be, as our group member suggested,…
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Listening to Ourselves
Starting Where We Are At the Universalist Recovery Church, we’ve been exploring different aspects of listening. For instance, when we listen deeply to one another, we provide each other a gift. We see, and we are seen; hear and are heard. That, by itself, can be healing. Listening to ourselves can be just as healing. But many people find it easier to listen to the stories, fears, and hopes of others than to pay attention to their own. When we hear what’s going on inside us, we can feel embarrassed or afraid. How, then, do we listen to ourselves without flinching? Where do we begin? According to the Buddhist teacher,…
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Living with Chronic Pain
Making Pain Worse Her pain was excruciating. She’d had two surgeries in as many days, and the stabbing, stinging ache she felt was worse, she said, than childbirth. She was scared, too. Not only could she barely move her legs, but she had a fever. She worried something terrible was wrong with her, but the staff dismissed her complaints. To make things worse, her doctor was already trying to wean her off the pain medication, as if she were a drug addict. She felt desperate, abandoned, and judged. Old traumas surfaced. Although she would “never” do anything to hurt herself, she prayed for God to take her. She wanted to…
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Witnessing as a Sacred Act of Love
The Healing Power of Witnessing The world has always needed healing. Even in idyllic communities, violence can disturb the peace, and it’s possible war dates back to the time when Homo Sapiens lived among the Neanderthals. We aren’t certain what wiped out those neighbors of ours. Today, though, things seem desperate. We continue to pollute the land, burn fossil fuels, and hunt animals to extinction. Hatred and intolerance are rampant. Around the world, totalitarian regimes are gaining traction. Politicians and police are abusing their power. Black and brown people are killed simply because they exist. And we can’t even agree to wear masks to keep our neighbors safe. It’s as…
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Fathers, Limits to Love, and Healing
Limited by Trauma She felt guilty. Her father had just died, but instead of feeling sad, she felt happy. Was she a horrible, heartless daughter? Not knowing what to think, she asked to talk to a chaplain. In bits and pieces, her story came out. For the last year and a half, she’d been her father’s caregiver. He’d never been easy to be around. A combat veteran, he had run his home with military discipline. Orderly, rigid, and autocratic, he showed his children a limited kind of love. Mostly he ignored them, but he could be abusive. When drunk, he was cruel to their mother. It was the typical story…
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Healing from Trauma
The Trauma of Coronavirus We live in a time of worldwide trauma. Not that this is new. After all, for as long as we have written down our histories, and perhaps before that, when all we had was an oral tradition filled with myths and violent gods, we humans have violated and terrorized one another. The coronavirus has merely made this more visible, at least to those of us whose lives are simple and orderly and safe. Now we are all in danger. An invisible virus is sickening and killing us. Our economies are falling apart. Stuck at home, lonely, bored, our tempers frayed, it seems our lives are unraveling.…
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Earth Day, Global Warming, and Love
The Answer Is Love Love is the answer. No matter the problem, the answer is love. I believe that. I really do. But today we’re talking about Earth Day and its theme for this year, climate change. What does love have to do with that? How can love help? Not everyone thinks it will. In July, I wrote about the Dirtbag Left, angry lefties who enjoy calling names and throwing hateful gibes into the virtual world as much as do reactionary Republicans. In his article about the digital nature of the presidential election, Kevin Roose quotes Mark Provost, a manager with the Other98%, as saying that Joe Biden could capitalize…
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Informed, not Controlled, by Our Past
We All Have a Past In the play, Rosmersholm, by Henrik Ibsen, the white horse symbolizes the past we can’t release. All of us have a past. Not only are we born into this world beholden to those who have come before us, made up of the flesh, dreams, and stories of our ancestors, but our own histories, events, and experiences mold themselves into our DNA. In the book Live Bait by P. J. Tracy, a police officer, Gino Rolseth, notices a scar on the chest of a retired colleague. Upon learning that the man’s own father had cut him, he closes his eyes and thinks “of all the history…
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Humility and Walking in Another’s Shoes
Walking in Each Other’s Shoes Early in my chaplaincy, when I worked on a detox unit where residents shared rooms, I helped a young, white man wrestle with his racism. Having been housed with a black man, he felt a mixture of disgust, anxiety, guilt, and a burgeoning respect. He discovered it is easy to hate someone you don’t know. Up close, hatred is a little harder. Our stories teach us about who we are. They also reveal who others are, both the stories they tell and the ones we tell about them. If we’re open to hearing another person’s story, we may find we identify with him in ways…