Our Lady of Sorrows
I recently turned 70, which seemed a rather monumental birth day, as birthdays go, and it has made me think about death and suffering and the transit of my life on this planet thus far. Also, today is the Marian feast day for Our Lady of Sorrows.
Every generation, IF we are lucky enough to reach old age, is going to have the honor of being ABLE to look back on the progression of their lives and see some remarkable twists and turns of history, due to advancements in science and politics and even natural disasters, such as the Covid pandemic, earthquakes, floods, and the like. We have NO way of knowing how things would have differed for us, had our circumstances been other than what they were.
(This year, I have been telling everyone that my birthday present is the birthday itself. 70. It's amazed me.)
We will, at times, wonder if things might have turned out better for us if we had been born to better people. By the time I was 5, my father had left our home to chase starlets, spending money on them that he should have spent on his children, who never went to a dentist, nor had proper shoes or clothing to wear, while he was buying boats, airplanes, and loose women. Meanwhile, his wife, our mother, was ill with multiple sclerosis and lupus and rheumatoid arthritis from her early 20's, waking up paralyzed on several occasions.
But my father's ill treatment of my mother did not endow her with sympathy for her children, however, and she treated me, in particular, as the scape goat, tormenting me with ruthless emotional abuse and giving me not a single shred of love my entire time with her, causing me to take my junior and senior classes in one year of high school and graduating a year early, just so I could leave home as soon as possible, walking out the door with nothing but the clothes on my back, shortly after I turned 17.
Is it legitimate to wonder what my life would have looked like, had I been raised with love by either parent, instead of the two narcissistic and utterly selfish people I was given? Of course, it is natural that this thought would blow across the sere landscape of my childhood memories.
Somehow, however, I am at peace with the idea that God had me born to the people and in the way he wanted me to. His reasons are his own, and I will never fault him for it, because I am not privy to the thoughts of Our Lord, and it is not my business to second guess Him because, if one actually believes in God, who is all good, one HAS to assume that "something good is going on," (as my old Hindu teacher used to say), no matter WHAT the circumstances of one's life. We are not entitled to know the reasons of God.
I make the best of my circumstances and usually experience great serenity of soul, despite the suffering. I know it does not seem possible and, indeed, many people have made assumptions about me, that if I have so many sufferings, then I must be miserable, but it isn't true. How suffering and blessedness can exist, side by side, at the same time and in the same person, is incomprehensible to many people but it is the spiritual version of walking and chewing gum at the same time. More than one layer of reality exists in our consciousness at the same time.
This does not mean that I do not suffer. Yes, I certainly suffer EXCEPT that, no matter how bad it gets, I have avoided feeling sorry for myself, and I think that this has made me, in general, happier than I have a right to be. I am quite sure I have not met my Lord's hopes for me and His standards, so I must not withdraw into self-pity, in case he decides to treat me as I really deserve to be treated. It is nothing but his generosity of grace that preserves us all from the fate we have earned, no matter how much we delude ourselves about how holy we are.
When I encounter the frustrations of life, I do feel those frustrations. But the drama is playing itself out on a blessed field. We are not expected to just lay down and say, "oh well, it's God's will. I will do nothing." That is not what we are called to do. We must fight it. If we have needs that are not being met, we must do what we can to ensure our survival and get those needs met. We do the best we can, make the calculations of action that we believe will bring the best result, but not grieve too much if we have miscalculated and the result is not what was desired.
I have been seeing a lot of very selfish and self-satisfied memes on social media lately. What most of my Catholic friends do not realize is that these are toxic message from the "New Age" philosophies which are the opposite of our Catholic faith. Each of these memes is some version of the admonition to shut up if you are suffering, don't tell anyone about it, and "be grateful" instead. This seems cruel to me for, if our neighbor is suffering and there may be something we can do to alleviate it, we will not know how we might do so, if they are under orders to keep a scarf stuffed in their mouth!
This offal sandwich is breaded, on the one side, with the writer's claim that they deserve to be friends with people who bring them only joy, and on the other side, with the instruction that anyone who is suffering should not only refrain from mentioning it, but should only talk about how grateful they are instead!
The fact is that we are all suffering, and when we love our neighbor, it is one sufferer healing another. The lacuna in my life matches an embarrassment of riches in the life of another person, and vice versa, and this is how we are all meant to get through life - helping one another, each in our own way.
I have had many opportunities to help other folks, even though my finances and physical condition are not good, because (like most people) I have other talents and treasures than the obvious. I try not to talk about my own "talents and treasures" unless it is necessary to the topic of a conversation. But it occurs to me that, if I am not allowed to discuss how I have helped someone, and it is not allowed for me to discuss the help that I myself need, and it is terrible to brag about my good fortune (which some people do to excess on social media, in my opinion) and many folks object to being forced to hear religious dissertations, then what exactly must I discuss? "Small talk" is very difficult for me, as it is for other Aspergerish folk and, while I can do it, exhaustion often results.
I have very few conversations, one-on-one, in my daily life, but with all the restrictions, I struggle to know what to say. I may try to touch on art or literature but, unless the other person has the same interests, it lands with a sodden thud in the middle of the discussion.
All of this makes for a recommendation to the solitary religious life for me and, although it is not understood very well by anyone else, it is perhaps what God had in mind for me all along, because nothing has worked so well, and I have also had many unpleasant pressures pushing me in that direction. Everything that has happened to me has contributed to the direction of my life which I believe is something close to what God had planned. I was not intelligent enough to figure it out for myself, so He had to close off all the other avenues to make sure I understood His meaning.
Every once in a while, though, I have a message that I need to give because THIS, this writing thing, is one of the "talents and treasures" with which The Lord has gifted me, and I think he expects me to exercise it, every now and then.
So, I think the message for today is simply this: Stop telling people to shut up and save you from having to listen to their pain. If there are some people who you think may harp on it a bit much, I will suggest that it is their effort to be HEARD in a sea of people who refuse to hear them that is causing them to repeat themselves. Maybe if just one person would do a splendid job of actually hearing that person, in a calm, patient, and nonjudgmental fashion, the sufferer may talk about it less than otherwise. It is in that hearing that the sufferer will find some relief.
God bless us all.
Silver Rose
No comments:
Post a Comment