Category Archives: Accompaniment

It’s Just Soup

My dad’s dad’s mom used to say this thing when someone was feeling quite wrapped up in the emotional urgency of a difficult situation.  He would remind the person that “you don’t have to drink the soup as hot as it boils.”

For a long time, I took this to mean that I just needed to give a tough situation a few minutes before throwing myself back into the mess, back into the emotional emergency. 

But the other day, my dad reminded me that, often, the situation is not worthy of the emotional emergency I place onto it.  That situation?  Hey, it’s just soup.  

Taken this way, the first seven words of my great-grandmother’s sentence also suffice as quality advice.  You don’t have to drink the soup.

I don’t take this as license to be aloof.  Rather, it is an invitation to hold my inner chatter and my emotional response to a given situation a little less tightly.  And this stance, in reality, frees me to be more thoughtful and generous, rather than obsessed with my own stress response.

So, hey, it is just soup.  And there will be more tomorrow.  

Consume accordingly. 

Close Enough to Love

The first line of Psalm 64 leads a crucial prayer: Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy. In some translations, fear is rendered as dread.

Is this not fascinating? In life, there is plenty of wanting to escape conflict with one’s enemies (real or imaginary) but here, we pray to deliver our lives from dread of these people and conflicts.

Dorothy Day wrote that only when we are delivered from this fear can we get close enough to love. Put another way, in order to love our “enemies,” we have to first pray for the grace to see our dread and to overcome it.

I don’t think that this is something we can do of our own power.

Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.

We Only Get a Vote When We Show Up

Last year, a friend witnessed the following interaction in a Zoom meeting about how to handle her child’s school year given the reality of COVID-19.

The conversation was heated, quite divided between those who wanted in-person school and those who wanted remote learning. A decisive policy would come down to a vote.

One parent was so furious that she said destructive things to the group and then signed off abruptly, minutes before the vote.

The vote was taken and tallied, not in her favor.

She signed in a few minutes after the vote, and asked to be counted. That was not what the process that group decided on, and so her vote was not registered.

The world tends toward disorder, so there are everywhere chances to make things better. We only get a vote about how our shared future unfolds when we show up. And our vote counts exponentially when we show up generously and with grand imagination.

Furious or Curious

The experience of anger can be quite involuntary. Something happens, trespassing against our expectations of how things should be, leaving us furious.

Okay. But then what happens.

Anger can quickly turn into self-righteousness, to barricading oneself on the moral high ground. And anger can take the legs out from under our ability to listen perceptively and to relate imaginatively to people who think differently from us. And because of this, anger can handicap any attempt to accurately perceive and productively improve the situation that made us angry in the first place.

We do not always have the choice to be furious. But we can, afterwards and always, choose to be curious.

(Hey!  The above reminds me of the dear Fr. Michael Rossmann, SJ’s recent post on his new Substack blog.  Check it out!)

Pebble Crayons

When our first son was two, I would take him to a toddler Montessori classroom. At the art station, there were a few crayons each shaped like a large pebble.

Our son did not yet know how to hold a regular crayon, but the form of these crayons taught him to. There is just no other way to hold a pebble if you want to write with it. He had to grip it correctly, at the tips of his fingers.

Our interior lives, too, benefit from us finding and using similar tools. Take prayers of thanksgiving, for instance. In this mode of prayer, we tune to the gifts of our lives and orient toward the God who is their origin. Simply by engaging the tool, I am productively oriented toward the stuff of my life.

This was also our hope, also, with the structure of Audacious Ignatius. We aimed to create stanzas and art that stick in the memory and then, when recalled, gracefully and productively orient the reader toward a gem of our tradition. Take for example:

“First, know well that I’m loved even though oh so flawed.
Next, spend time with the Lord and to walk where he trod.
Offer all I possess, beg for my stony-heart thawed,
And act from a deep love, the love that is God.”

These are only three (pithy?) sentences. But when held, they may remind the reader of the depth of their experience with the Spiritual Exercises or uncover a desire to engage with them.

Whatever the topography of our interior lives, let’s find and use the pebble crayons that orient us gracefully and productively.

Deferred Maintenance

Last summer, we bought a 2003 Honda Odyssey from another Foreign Service family who was about to move. I think that they thought they were not going to be able to sell it. They had deferred a great deal of maintenance.

We cleaned the car inside and out. Twice. We replaced the tires, oil, filters, windshield wipers, antifreeze, antifreeze cap, shocks, struts, brake fluid, and brake pads. We greased one of the sliding doors and peeled all the old stickers off of the dash.

The van now runs great and facilitates our on-going family adventure. If we had deferred its maintenance for much longer, it would not have been able to do so.

We can defer maintenance on things that are much more fundamental to our life’s adventure than a vehicle. Our interior lives. Our closest relationships. Connections to the communities that formed us.

Let’s not defer maintenance on these most important things.

Teaching That Takes Something Away

When both of our sons were learning to eat solid food, they would occasionally stuff so much in their mouths that they could no longer eat.  The only way forward was to take all the food out and start again.  Teaching them to eat, then, meant taking food away.

The best teachers, I think, do something similar.  If a learner is stuck on a limiting belief or an idol of the mind, the savvy teacher does not add more input.  Instead, she works to relieve the learner of the limitation.  Once this idol is removed, the learner has more space to see what is real.

Frustratingly, our brains protect these idols with brutal force, namely through confirmation bias, making giving up limiting beliefs uniquely difficult.  The idol’s bodyguards can live inside the texture of our own thinking. 

While difficult, relinquishing a limiting way of thinking is some of the most important learning we can do.  Giving up the “information” that limits our intelligence, imagination, and love can save our lives.

Beginning With Joy

Most afternoons, I take our sons to a neighborhood park.  Our two-year-old is fascinated by the basketball hoop there.

He will take our mini soccer ball out of the stroller, square up to the hoop, and shoot the ball.  The hoop is regulation size, so his attempt falls well short.  Sometimes it flies backwards over his head.

Two bits to note:

First: He loves this exercise.  He knows he is not “doing it right,” but delights absolutely in the attempt.

Second:  He is actually getting better.  He is jumping and releasing the ball at (more or less) the right time.  The ball flies a little higher.

When we start any new thing, we are not going to be awesome at it.  A new flavor of empathy.  Communication in a new context.  Navigating the interior life after major life events.  We will surely stumble.  How could it be otherwise?

But if we accept the newness with joy and gentleness, a new world can open up. And absent this gentle joy, it can be very difficult to begin something new.

Feel Good or Think Hard?

When we choose where and how to learn about the world, (i.e. a news source, a podcast, membership in a community) what guides this decision?  

Do we seek to feel good?  Perhaps morally superior?  

Or do we seek to learn?  To think hard and cultivate an expansive vision of the world?

It’s up to us to strike a balance.  This balance takes courage and serves the common good.