Is this all there is?

Nothing disquiets the soul more than a feeling of being unfinished, adrift, rudderless at the same time. There is something more we’re meant to do in life, we’re sure, but no way, apparently, to dispel the aura of aimlessness in which we have begun to live. I go to work every morning but no amount of money could really make me like it, feel good about being there, able to convince myself that being there is where I’m meant to be.

There is a cosmic sense of frustration about knowing myself to be on the way to somewhere—but in the dark. I do my best at everything I do, however mundane, however humble.

I avoid class reunions because everybody else there talks big plans about big things, but nothing big has ever happened to me. Nor have I begun yet to realize that there is a distinction between going to work and pursuing my call. So I go through life disappointed with the job but unable to realize that the call, for me, may be far and wide away from any paid occupation anywhere.

I have yet to understand that my call may start after work ends every day. My call may be to organize games for street children, or write to prisoners, or make casseroles for the old woman next door, or learn another language in order to help refugees adapt to the small white town in which I live.

The point is clear: my sense of worth and purpose in life is tied up with the quality of life I provide for others, for the planet, for the human race. Solving equations all day long, or encoding a computer all day long can also be boring, can also seem worthless, unless I’m doing these things in order to be some small part in curing an insidious disease or finding a formula that reduces the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

It may be something as simple as producing materials that ennoble the human mind rather than pander to it, selling and creating things that enhance life rather than destroy it. And, yes, making hamburgers for those who can pay for them can also be a call, provided that working in this place is what enables me to care consciously for someone else in some other way.

In the end, it is passion and purpose—passion and purpose—that are of the essence of a vocation, a call to do something that makes me a conscious co-creator of the world.

Is it too late to start over?

What happens if we should begin again and do not? One thing is sure: the risks of not pursuing our deepest gifts, our strongest passions, our need for higher purpose in life also are serious, not only for ourselves but for those around us as well, whose happiness quotient will be affected by our own. Frustration with what is, the ennui that develops in the face of what has never been, and the sense of emptiness that comes from leaving behind part of ourselves that could have been pursued but was not, are serious breaches of life.

Obviously there is a public risk in allowing ourselves to grow slowly, steadily into the resolution of the self, but there is even worse risk if we attempt to ignore it. Frustration triggered more by what is missing in life than by what we are dealing with there saps our energy for anything else. We get irritable with others. We get even more disgusted with the self in us that we have learned to dislike. Inertia fills the space where love of life used to be. Emptiness colors and smothers everything we attempt to do.

Clearly, “It’s too late for that now” is too great a burden to bear. When is it too late to start over? Never. Not as long as we are alive and seeking even more out of life. Beethoven, deaf as stone, knew that and went on composing long after he could hear what he wrote.

Life is lived in stages. Everything in one stage is simply a prelude to the next, where the lessons will be even more life-giving than before and past learning will take on new value.

“We are always beginning to live,” the Roman poet Manilius wrote in the first century, “but are never living.” We are always becoming, never at any given moment totally and finally complete. The only answer, then, to the question of whether we should start over again is to do what we must in every stage and be ready, when the time comes, to go on living fully in the next one.

–from Following the Path: The Search of a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy by Joan Chittister

Testing the mettle of the self

Dailiness tests the mettle of the self. The ability to go back to the same task, day after day—taking care of the children, doing the shopping, hawking a product, stacking the shelves—with new attention to the task, with new concern for the outcome, takes a special kind of faith, another kind of trust.
 
It’s learning to bring your whole self to something that makes the difference between a happy life and a dull life, a holy life and an empty one.

Life is not made up of crises; life is made up of little things we love to ignore in order to get on to the exciting things in life. But God is in the details. God is what it takes in us to be faithful to them. God is in the routines that make us what we are. The way we do the little things in life is the mark of the bigness of our souls.

It’s when we go on in the heat of the noonday sun that we know what it’s like to walk the dusty roads of Galilee. It’s when we go on without firecrackers or music that we understand what the desert is like. It’s when we go on despite the fact that quitting would be more satisfying that we know that God has taken control of our lives. Then, we are being used for something greater than ourselves.
Dailiness is the great deep pit out of which the character of our lives takes its most lasting shape. It is the repository of our greatest graces and site of our worst losses. It is the treasure house of all our yesterdays and the reserve out of which we draw strength for all our tomorrows.

(Joan Chittister- Called to question)

A Place Called "Home"

In each of us there is a place where we go in the middle of chaos to escape from the fray. It is that “home” place, that hiding place, that soft place where no memories of it come with ragged edges and no thought of it is tinged with fear. It’s an empty beach, perhaps. Or a hidden place on the bluff above town where we remember being able to see everything while no one could see us.

It is the place of our dreams and the hope of our hopes.

It’s that place to which we return in our minds to change life in the middle of too much life for us to take just then.

It’s that natural place within us where the roar of the water or the silence of the mountains or the warmth of the desert or the moss of the swamp soothes our souls and makes us feel human again, at one with the universe again, in control again.

Whatever it is, wherever it is, it calms us and makes us new again.

 

Gratitude Is the Key

"I learn by going where I have to go..." 

All of life cannot be planned. Our life is God's and gratitude is its key.

Giving thanks to God is good psychologically to keep our thoughts light and full of energy. It is not true, psychologists tell us, that we think the way we feel. On the contrary, we feel the way we think and thoughts can be changed.

Giving thanks to God is good spiritually. That is the beginning of contemplation.

Giving thanks to God is good socially. It makes us a positive presence in a group. (Only negative people want to be around negative people.)

We need to stop and thank God–consciously–for the good things of the day. We spend so much time wanting things to be better that we fail to see our real gifts. There are banquets in our life and we don't enjoy them because we are always grasping for something more: the perfect schedule, the perfect work, the perfect friend, the perfect community. We have to realize that God's gifts are all around us, that joy is an attitude of mind, an awareness that my life is basically good. Dissatisfaction is too often a sign of something wrong in me

RELIGION AND HAPPINESS

What, if anything, does the average person learn about happiness from religion, the only discipline whose entire intent is to describe eternal happiness?

Religion, unlike any other system on the planet, sets out to teach us how to live, how to make choices and come to decisions that are, in the end, eternally good ones. However much religion may have dabbled in other systems along the way, it is not about the governance or economic security or intercultural relationships or the business of national growth. It is the only institution on the planet that makes happiness primary and takes happiness seriously. Religion, in fact, puts happiness first and foremost, beyond everything else on its agenda. Religion purports to be what Aristotle insisted was the very essence of life—the meaning and purpose of life.

The fact is that religion shapes attitudes. It directs us to elements of life that we should be developing, or it closes some of them off to us. It can set out to develop us as moral agents and spiritual adults, or it can suppress the religious imagination to the point of religious servitude.

Cultivating within ourselves the ability to distinguish one response from another has something to do with becoming both psychologically whole and philosophically astute.

What religion teaches us about happiness and how we can achieve it will, in the end, shape our very notions of life and growth. More than that, perhaps, it has the capacity to lead us through the darkness of pain and enable us to recognize pleasures that offer more than dulling boredom or inadequate and immature spiritual development.

The role and place of religion in life have both a personal and social impact. Religion's definition of happiness and the way to achieve it is no small concern for the world. It tells us a great deal about ourselves and even more about the God we believe in but cannot see except, perhaps, in the shadows we cast for one another because of the religions we say we follow.

— from Happiness by Joan Chittister (Eerdmans)

Cultivate Surprise

Some things in life are simply too exciting to ignore. They come when we least expect them. They explode into the middle of the mundane and race through our veins faster than our hearts can handle the pressure of them. They leave us in a kind of spiritual shock, a sort of spiritual numbness. 

The conversation we doubted we'd ever have is about to happen. The letter we thought would never come arrives. The opportunity we never dreamed would be offered to us is now, unexpectedly, within reach. Life is suddenly different. 

Where, we wonder, do such things come from in the midst of the daily, at the center of unrelenting dullness? 

Life simply keeps intruding on our plans, our decisions, our certainties, our fears. What can we say to ourselves about such things? 

How can our souls absorb such things, how can our minds make sense of them, how can we possibly respond to them? Most of all, what is their spiritual meaning for us? 

Those are not easy questions. They require that we make some decisions about the nature of life itself. As in, is life only random? Does nothing explain the unexplainable? Is there such a thing as destiny? Are we at the mercy of fate? Are we simply pawns in the senseless spinning of an erratic universe? 

To live life without living it with exuberance is one of the saddest burdens a person can choose to carry. It is a wound that is self-inflicted. To live with no life in us is a curse of our own making. 

As surprising and unsettling as the twists and turns of life may be, it is even more damaging to simply take life itself for granted. If we do that, we are fast on our way to becoming inured to the pulse of life that beats through all our days, however taxing, however difficult. If we miss the little things, we will soon begin to take love and friendship and blessing for granted. Perhaps even miss them entirely. When we do not cultivate a sense of surprise, we give in to the emotional dysfunction that suffocates the breath of life in us. Our hearts go sour and our souls go blind. We lack the open-armed exuberance for life that makes the human human. 

It is time to pray for the spiritual consciousness of the unexpected so that Life at work in us can astonish us with its real fullness.

A KEY TO PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH

Forgiveness!!!

"I kept my sin secret and my frame
wasted away. Day and night your
hand was heavy upon me." – Ps. 32

This psalm is a piece of very good psychology about the burdens we carry within us, our unforgiven sins.

When we don't face our faults, our problems, our weakness, our angers, our sense of inadequacy — worse, when we blame them on others, or deny them, or need to be perfect, or become defensive — we refuse to accept ourselves. Every doctor and psychologist in the country sees the effect of that in their offices every day.

We all have things we need to forgive in ourselves or face in ourselves. We have things we know we ought to ask forgiveness for from someone else, but pride and stubbornness hold us back.

These things become a barrier between us and the community, a hot stone in the pit of the stomach, a block to real happiness. And nothing is going to get better until we face them.

Forgiveness occurs when we don't need to hold a grudge anymore: when we are strong enough to be independent of whatever, whoever it was that so ruthlessly uncovered the need in us. Forgiveness is not the problem; it's living till it comes that taxes all the strength we have.

Some people think that forgiveness is incomplete until things are just as they were before. But the truth is that after great hurt, things are never what they were before: they can only be better or nothing at all. Both of which are acceptable states of life.

"Life is an adventure in forgiveness," Norman Cousins said. You will, in other words, have lots of opportunity to practice. Don't wait too long to start or life will have gone by before you ever lived it.

Happiness — a work in progress

Happiness, I have learned, is a work in progress.

We become happy by learning to appreciate what we have as well as to achieve what we want.

We become happy by cultivating the highest levels of human response in ourselves—in the arts, culture, creativity, understanding, productivity, and purpose.

We become happy by concentrating on the gifts of life rather than obsessing over its possible pitfalls.

We become happy by refusing to allow externals to be the measure of the acme of our souls. "Those who have cattle," the Kenyans teach us, "have care."

We become happy by refusing to be beguiled by accumulation or power or pure utilitarianism, by power or excess or withdrawal fron the great encounters with life.

We become happy by defining a purpose in life and pursuing it with all the heart that is in us, with all the energy we have.

Finally, we must learn to keep our eye on happiness rather than simply on pleasure. It is the confusion of the two that endangers the goal.

An excerpt from Happiness "Once upon a time," the tale tells, "an angel appeared to a seeker hard at work in the field of life and said, 'I have been instructed by the gods to inform you that you will have 10,000 more lives.'" The wanderer who had been pursuing the dream of eternal life for years, slumped to the ground in despair. "Oh, no," the seeker cried. "Ten thousand more lives; ten thousand more lives!" and the seeker wailed and rolled in the dust. Then the angel moved on to another seeker bent over in the heat of the day and repeated the same message. "I have been told to tell you," the angel said, "that you will have 10,000 more lives." "Really?" the seeker exclaimed. "Ten thousand more lives?" Then the seeker straightened up, arms flung toward heaven, head up, face beaming and began to dance and prance and shout with joy. "Only 10,000 more lives!" the seeker cried ecstatically. "Only 10,000 more lives." There is, I've come to understand as the years go by, a bit of both these seekers in all of us. Certainly in me. One part of me, like the Sufi promised 10,000 more lives, goes in and out of phases at the very thought of it, moaning with the Hebrew psalmist as I go, "O woe is me that my journey is prolonged. With the poet, I "all alone beweep my outcaste state" when life takes one of its erratic swings and turns on me, deprives me, I think, rejects me, or, most of all, denies me what I want. I mourn the lack of something, someone, some time, somewhere, that I'm certain will certainly make me happy again. On the other hand, I have loved life. Like the second seeker, I have loved every moment of it, however deep the difficulty of living in a family that was never really a family. I lusted after every breath of it. I always thought of it as getting better, getting fuller even while I lived a life that by nature limited the things others used to mark their security or their success or their lifetime records of happiness. I got older and loved it even more. There wasn't much left of it in my drawers and cupboards but I found a great deal of what it meant to me inside. Whatever the struggles of it—the deaths, the life changes, the polio, the wrenching attempts to make better the parts of it crushed under the weight of inertia—I would take more of it if I could. And I am convinced that I am not alone. As I begin this book, I look back on a life that has, it seems, had its share of what the world could call unhappiness: early deaths that changed the course of my life but which I could not claim destroyed it; debilitating illnesses that never really managed to debilitate me; sharp shifts in the hopes and plans of a lifetime that leave me a bit wistful yet but not at all defeated; and the continuing struggles to be fully human in a man's world and fully adult in a clericalized church that is more comfortable with martinets and minions that it is with thinking women. But real as those things are, they are the stuff of challenge, not of unhappiness. Unless, of course, I fail to make the distinction between what it is to be challenged by life and what it is to be fulfilled by it. Happiness, I have learned, is a work in process.

Self-Acceptance (from J. Chittister)

You love those who search for truth.
In wisdom, center me, for you
know my frailty. Psalm 51
 

The dictum "Know thyself," which appeared at the shrine of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi in sixth-century BC Greece, is one of the oldest directives in Western philosophy. It's good advice. We so often project onto other people the tendencies we fail to recognize in ourselves. In our time, however, the concern is as much about self-esteem as it is about self-knowledge. Both positions are valuable. But both of them are insufficient, I think.

Self-knowledge gives us perspective and self-esteem gives us confidence, but it's self-acceptance that gives us peace of heart. It implies, of course, that I know myself and value myself. Yet, unless I can simply start by accepting myself, it is possible that neither of the other two dimensions can ever come to life in me. Clearly, even if I know who I am, even if I admit the truth about myself, if I don't accept what I see there, I can never really value it. Worse, I'll live in fear that someone else will see to the core of me and reject me, too.

But, the psalmist teaches us, that's precisely where the God who birthed us, our loving Mother God, becomes the mainstay, not the menace, of our lives. God knows exactly who we are. God knows our frailty. And God accepts it. And gathers it in. God loves us, not despite it, but because of it, because of the effort it implies and the trust it demands. There is glory in the clay of us. There is beauty in becoming. The static notion of life, the idea that we can become something and stay that way, is a false one. We face newness all our lives. We search all our days for truth. And God loves us for the seeking. What we need is not perfection. What we need is a center that stabilizes us in times of change, in us as well as around us.

Soul Points…
• "In wisdom, center me," the psalmist has us pray. Everybody is centered in something. In each of us there is that internal magnet that guides our decisions and occupies our thoughts. For some it's fear; for others it's ambition; for many it's social acceptance; for a portion of humanity it's independence; for real unfortunates it's perfection of one kind or another. When the internal lodestone is wisdom, however, we are able to take life as it is and just be happy that we learned from it instead of being crushed by it.

• Anyone who says they want to be young again is either a fool or a liar. In the first place, that period was no easier than this one. Oftentimes harder, in fact. In the second place, the task of that time was to bring us to this one. There is something in the now for us that will make the future even better if we can just keep moving toward it. Don't stop living just because life isn't perfect.

• I write my life in my own blood. Anything else is sham. When I hurt, I'll know what hurt is all about. When I fail, I'll find out what survival is all about. When I love, I'll come to know what selflessness is all about. And when we know those things, we will be both wise and fully alive.

A wisdom story from Anthony de Mello, S.J.…
 
I was a neurotic for years. I was anxious and depressed and selfish. And everyone kept telling me to change. And everyone kept telling me how neurotic I was. And I resented them, and I agreed with them, and I wanted to change, but I just couldn't bring myself to change, no matter how hard I tried. What hurt the most was that my best friend also kept telling me how neurotic I was. He too kept insisting that I change. And I agreed with him too, though I couldn't bring myself to resent him. And I felt so powerless and so trapped. Then one day he said to me, "Don't change. Stay as you are. It really doesn't matter whether you change or not. I love you just as you are; I cannot help loving you." These words sounded like music to my ears: "Don't change. Don't change. Don't change. I love you." And I relaxed. And I came alive. And, oh wondrous marvel, I changed. The Song of the Bird