on accompaniment, attentiveness, and contribution
The strain of caring for a young person through a trying stage.
A disorienting heartache.
The pain of having let someone down.
This, too, shall pass.
And yet, do I truly want to wish it quickly away? If I do, I very well may miss the meaning of the experience. I may short-circuit the work it wants to achieve in me.
So, yes… this, too, shall pass… but before it does, I promise to be present with it.
I hope that you, some day, run into The Monsters’ Monster, a witty, subtle tale about the power of gratitude.
Let’s all, like the Monster, say “dank you” a bit more.
ps – Happy Thanksgiving, all.
pps- And Katie and I are grateful to Fr. James Martin for this post about The Examen Book. Thank you, Jim!
I read (and then re-read and re-read) the following this week.
“The neurosis of our age is the fear of being all that we are. And in the fear of being all that we are, we pretend that we are less than we are. And in pretending that we are less than we are, we are anxious. And we are anxious because we are afraid that someone might pull the curtain back and we might be discovered and we might have to stand up and be what we are. We might have to stand up and in an open-faced, vulnerable way, acknowledge… just how broken and how whole… how fleeting and eternal, how human and divine we are.” -Jim Finley quoting Rollo May in Christian Meditation: Entering the Mind of Christ (around 5:24:00 in the audio version)
Whoa!
The point Finley was making is that in meditation practice, we are able to (very slowly and patiently) accept the totality of all that we are, and so live differently.
But I think we also need relationships for this level of acceptance. We need people who are able to see the broken, the fleeting, the human – and who love us anyway – and who help us hold it all gently. And we need people who can, at the same time, mirror back the wholeness, the eternal, the divine in us.
This is a profound gift to receive and to offer. Let’s try to do it more often.
The other day, I saw a car and a bike heading toward each other on the same narrow-ish street. Then I saw the car slow down, pull over, and actually put two tires up on the curb to give the bike more space.
I see similar deference to bikes here routinely. It’s “how things are done around here.”
Sometimes, we are so immersed in the culture of a place or institution that we do not even name or acknowledge the reality of “how things are done.”
But when we slow down and observe (and/or listen to people who are not like us), we see this “how things are done” more clearly. Once we have seen it, we have the choice to consider if this kind of culture contributes to our common flourishing.
If it does not contribute to our flourishing, we can then choose to live and speak a different way.
There is a profound power in the reality of “people like us do things like this.”
The shelves of our sons’ Montessori classroom are lined with work activities. Many of these activities have multiple “presentations,” ways to engage the work at a deeper and deeper level. (They once reported that one work had eight presentations.) They feel energized and fascinated by the unfolding complexity and richness of the work.
The child would likely not know how to access this depth of experience if there is not a guide to accompany them and a community of practice with which to engage.
I think the church, at its best, is characterized by this kind of interaction, that we might learn the next presentation of the complexity and richness of the sacramentality of our world.
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