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